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Published in the journal Landscape Ecology, the findings suggest upstream forests' increased water consumption could leave less water downstream for forests, cities and wildlife during drought.
"We're expecting that droughts will become more severe and frequent, so it's important to understand how that's going to influence the amount of water we have available," said the study's lead author Katie McQuillan, a graduate student in the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State. "We found that these forests are using more water on average during droughts, and that leads to less water ending up downstream."
In the study, researchers analyzed how trees use water and release it as vapor based on thermal infrared remote sensing data gathered by satellites between 1984 and 2020. They used that data to understand trends in forest water use for more than 15,000 square miles of forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains across Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia.
"Forested mountain regions are super important for the quality and quantity of water that we have downstream," McQuillan said. "Mountain forests produce some of the cleanest and most stable sources of water, and have an impact on how much water is available downstream for people and aquatic species."
In part of their analysis, they tracked whether forests used more or less water than normal for each pixel of mapped land -- averaged based on elevation -- in moderate, severe and extreme droughts.
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