Natural and managed watersheds show similar responses to recent climate change

Changes in climate are driving an intensification of the hydrologic cycle and leading to alterations of natural streamflow regimes. Human disturbances such as dams, land-cover change, and water diversions are thought to obscure climate signals in hydrologic systems. As a result, most studies of changing hydroclimatic conditions are limited to areas with natural streamflow. Here, we compare trends in observed streamflow from natural and human-modified watersheds in the United States and Canada for the 1981–2015 water years to evaluate whether comparable responses to climate change are present in both systems. We find that patterns and magnitudes of trends in median daily streamflow, daily streamflow variability, and daily extremes in human-modified watersheds are similar to those from nearby natural watersheds. Streamflow in both systems show negative trends throughout the southern and western United States and positive trends throughout the northeastern United States, the northern Great Plains, and southern prairies of Canada. The trends in both natural and human-modified watersheds are linked to local trends in precipitation and reference evapotranspiration, demonstrating that water management and land-cover change have not substantially altered the effects of climate change on human-modified watersheds compared with nearby natural watersheds.

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Spatial features of land use/land cover change in the United States

Journal of Geographical Sciences ◽

10.1007/bf02873148 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 63-70 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Zhiqiang Gao ◽

Jiyuan Liu ◽

Xiangzheng Deng

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Land Use ◽

Land Cover ◽

Land Cover Change ◽

The United States ◽

Land Use Land Cover ◽

Spatial Features

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Late twentieth century land-cover change in the basin and range ecoregions of the United States

Regional Environmental Change ◽

10.1007/s10113-012-0296-3 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 813-823 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Christopher E. Soulard ◽

Benjamin M. Sleeter

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Land Cover ◽

Land Cover Change ◽

The United States ◽

Basin And Range ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Late Twentieth Century

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Effects of contemporary land-use and land-cover change on the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in the United States

Environmental Research Letters ◽

10.1088/1748-9326/aab540 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 045006 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Benjamin M Sleeter ◽

Jinxun Liu ◽

Colin Daniel ◽

Bronwyn Rayfield ◽

Jason Sherba ◽

...

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Land Use ◽

Land Cover ◽

Land Cover Change ◽

Carbon Balance ◽

Terrestrial Ecosystems ◽

The United States

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Spatial patterns of the United States National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) land-cover change thematic accuracy (2001–2011)

International Journal of Remote Sensing ◽

10.1080/01431161.2017.1410298 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 39 (6) ◽

pp. 1729-1743 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

J. Wickham ◽

S. V. Stehman ◽

C. G. Homer

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Land Cover ◽

Land Cover Change ◽

Spatial Patterns ◽

The United States ◽

National Land Cover Dataset ◽

Thematic Accuracy

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Implementation of CCDC to produce the LCMAP Collection 1.0 annual land surface change product

10.5194/essd-2021-202 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

George Xian ◽

Kelcy Smith ◽

Danika Wellington ◽

Josephine Horton ◽

Qiang Zhou ◽

...

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Land Cover ◽

Land Cover Change ◽

Land Surface ◽

The United States ◽

Land Resource ◽

Land Change ◽

Continuous Change ◽

Ancillary Data ◽

Surface Change

Abstract. The increasing availability of high-quality remote sensing data and advanced technologies have spurred land cover mapping to characterize land change from local to global scales. However, most land change datasets either span multiple decades at a local scale or cover limited time over a larger geographic extent. Here, we present a new land cover and land surface change dataset created by the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) program over the conterminous United States (CONUS). The LCMAP land cover change dataset consists of annual land cover and land cover change products over the period 1985–2017 at 30-meter resolution using Landsat and other ancillary data via the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm. In this paper, we describe our novel approach to implement the CCDC algorithm to produce the LCMAP product suite composed of five land cover and five land surface change related products. The LCMAP land cover products were validated using a collection of ~25,000 reference samples collected independently across CONUS. The overall agreement for all years of the LCMAP primary land cover product reached 82.5 %. The LCMAP products are produced through the LCMAP Information Warehouse and Data Store (IW+DS) and Shared Mesos Cluster systems that can process, store, and deliver all datasets for public access. To our knowledge, this is the first set of published 30 m annual land cover and land cover change datasets that span from the 1980s to the present for the United States. The LCMAP product suite provides useful information for land resource management and facilitates studies to improve the understanding of terrestrial ecosystems and the complex dynamics of the Earth system. The LCMAP system could be implemented to produce global land change products in the future.

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