Impacts of Land-Use and Climate Changes on Hydrologic Processes in the Qingyi River Watershed, China

AbstractThe impacts of human-induced land-use and climate changes on hydrologic processes have become a great challenge and attracted widespread attention of many researchers. Dramatic changes in land use and climate have occurred in the mountainous Qingyi River watershed in southwest China in the last three decades. Variable infiltration capacity (VIC), a large-scale hydrologic model, was used in this study to assess the impacts of land-use and climate changes on surface runoff, base flow, streamflow, and evapotranspiration (ET) of this watershed. The analysis for this study includes (1) investigation of change in historical land-use patterns, (2) detection of climate change (precipitation and mean temperature), and (3) simulation and assessment of hydrologic responses to these changes. The Mann-Kendall test was used to identify the long-term monotonic trends in precipitation and temperature for the period of 1980–2005. The results suggest no significant change in annual precipitation and a significant i...