Assessment of climate change and forest conservation impact on ecologically relevant flows: A case study in Wang River Bain, Thailand
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Abstract
Climate change is a major threat to river basins and ecosystems, leading to changes in ecosystems due to rising temperatures, expansion or contraction of specific habitat boundaries, and alterations in the timing of the seasons. This study investigated climate and land use changes to predict future hydrological regime in the Wang River Basin (WRB) and its impact on the ecosystem, focusing on key flow properties such as magnitude, duration, and intensity. The flow properties were studied based on the indicators of hydrologic alteration software and environmental flow components, which were separated into five groups and considered for economic and forest conservation scenarios based on the representative concentration pathway (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) trajectories. The results showed that future climate change in the WRB will involve severe maximum/minimum temperature increases of 2.09–1.95°C and 4.01–4.05°C for RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 respectively, while the annual rainfall trend will decrease during the 2030s and the 2050s and then increase during the 2070s and the 2090s or a change ranging from -1.96 to 6.10% for RCP4.5 and 1.43 to 6.68% for RCP8.5 from 2030s to 2090s. The projected annual discharges for the combined impacts of climate change and land use change during 2030–2090 indicated that the discharge will tend to decrease in the future, especially in the near future (ranging from -9.75 to -12.32%). Furthermore, there will be an increase in the rise and fall rates (120.24-147.11% and 61.24–62.30%). Consequently, these impacts will eventually affect the livelihoods and ecosystems in this river basin.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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