TY - JOUR T1 - Evapotranspiration response to land cover and climate change in a Midwest U.S. watershed JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/075598 SP - 075598 AU - S.K. Hamilton AU - M.Z. Hussain AU - C. Lowrie AU - B. Basso AU - G. P. Robertson Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/16/075598.abstract N2 - In temperate humid watersheds, evapotranspiration returns more than half of the annual precipitation to the atmosphere, thereby determining the balance available to recharge groundwaters and support stream flow and lake levels. Changes in evapotranspiration rates and therefore watershed hydrology could be driven by changes in land use or climate. Here we examine the watershed water balance over the past 50 years for a watershed in southwest Michigan covered by cropland, grassland, forest, and wetlands. Over the study period about 27% of the watershed has been abandoned from row-crop agriculture to perennial vegetation and about 20% of the watershed has reverted to deciduous forest, and the climate has warmed by 1.14°C. Despite these changes, precipitation and stream discharge, and by inference evapotranspiration, have been stable over the study period. The remarkably stable rates of evapotranspirative water loss from the watershed across a period of significant land cover change indicate that rainfed annual crops and perennial vegetation have similar evapotranspiration rates, a conclusion supported by measurements of evapotranspiration from various vegetation types based on soil water monitoring. Therefore the hydrology of this humid temperate landscape has been resilient in the face of both land cover and climate change over the past 50 years. ER -