Tropical forests mitigate extreme weather events

Terra Daily via SPX: Tropical forests reduce peak runoff during storms and release stored water during droughts, according to researchers working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Their results lend credence to a controversial phenomenon known as the sponge effect, which is at the center of a debate about how to minimize flood damage and maximize water availability in the tropics.

During nearly 450 tropical storms, a team of visiting scientists from the University of Wyoming measured the amount of runoff from pastureland, abandoned pastureland and forested land as part of a large-scale land-use experiment in the Panama Canal watershed initiated by STRI.

Data collected by STRI staff and analyzed by University of Wyoming students indicate that land-use history has complex, long-term effects.

"We measured large differences in hydrologic response between watersheds with different land-use histories and land cover," said Fred Ogden, STRI Senior Research Associate and Civil Engineering Professor at the University of Wyoming.

"Our ultimate objective is to better understand these effects and include this improved understanding in a high-resolution hydrological model that we are developing to predict land-use effects in tropical watersheds."....

A forest in Belize, shot by Dennis Jarvis, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license