Revealing the Impact of Deforestation on Hydrology over the Dry Chaco, Using Remote Sensing and Land Surface Modelling

The Dry Chaco ecoregion is the world's largest continuous dry forest ( 647,500 km²). The region is located in South America, east of the Andes and west of the Paraguay River. Since the 1980s, the region has undergone an intensive process of forest degradation and fragmentation from selective logging, cattle, charcoal and soybean production resulting in a total forest loss of almost 20%. This unprecedented forest degradation causes a disruption in the hydrological cycle and dryland salinity.

This study aims at better understanding of the impact of forest degradation on the local hydrology and salinity over the Argentinian Chaco, using land surface modeling and remote sensing data. More specifically, default climatological vegetation parameters (LAI, NDVI, greenness) in state-of-the-art land surface models (LSM) grouped within the NASA Land Information System (LIS) are updated using satellite-based dynamic vegetation data in order to incorporate deforestation into the models.

The presentation will show a spatio-temporal analysis of satellite-based vegetation data (LAI, NDVI) over the region to reveal patterns of deforestation, and long-term LIS simulations using a range of land surface models (Noah, CLM, CLSM, Noah MP) in which dynamically updated vegetation data are included. Model output will be evaluated using in situ soil moisture data combined with various retrieval products of soil moisture from SMOS (operational Level 2 and SMOS-IC) and SMAP (operational Level 2), groundwater from GRACE and evapotranspiration data from MODIS.