Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 531

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 71 of the 71 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

On the forest cover–water yield debate: from demand‐ to supply‐side thinking

Open access
Ellison, David, N. Futter, Martyn, Bishop, Kevin·2012·Global Change Biology

Abstract

Several major articles from the past decade and beyond conclude the impact of reforestation or afforestation on water yield is negative: additional forest cover will reduce and removing forests will raise downstream water availability. A second group of authors argue the opposite: planting additional forests should raise downstream water availability and intensify the hydrologic cycle. Obtaining supporting evidence for this second group of authors has been more difficult due to the larger scales at which the positive effects of forests on the water cycle may be seen. We argue that forest cover is inextricably linked to precipitation. Forest‐driven evapotranspiration removed from a particular catchment contributes to the availability of atmospheric moisture vapor and its cross‐continental transport, raising the likelihood of precipitation events and increasing water yield, in particular in continental interiors more distant from oceans. Seasonal relationships heighten the importance of this phenomenon. We review the arguments from different scales and perspectives. This clarifies the generally beneficial relationship between forest cover and the intensity of the hydrologic cycle. While evidence supports both sides of the argument – trees can reduce runoff at the small catchment scale – at larger scales, trees are more clearly linked to increased precipitation and water availability. Progressive deforestation, land conversion from forest to agriculture and urbanization have potentially negative consequences for global precipitation, prompting us to think of forest ecosystems as global public goods. Policy‐making attempts to measure product water footprints, estimate the value of ecosystem services, promote afforestation, develop drought mitigation strategies and otherwise manage land use must consider the linkage of forests to the supply of precipitation.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02589.x

Cites

71 of 71 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 71 references

Cited by

See all 531

Metadata

Authors
Ellison, D., N. Futter, M., & Bishop, K.
Venue
Global Change Biology
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2011-12-06
Volume
18
Issue
3
Pages
806-820
ISSN
  • 1354-1013 (ISSN-L)
  • 1365-2486
OpenAlex
W2038547406
Cited by
531
References
71
FWCI
19.71
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: On the forest cover–water yield debate: from demand‐ to supply‐side thinking. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02589.x
The paper
Ellison, D., N. Futter, M., & Bishop, K. (2012). On the forest cover–water yield debate: from demand‐ to supply‐side thinking. Global Change Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02589.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.