Watersheds degrade and this makes river flow less predictable: bigger floods and lower dry season flow

Landscapes translate a temporal pattern of rainfall into a temporal pattern of stream flow, which aggregates up to a river. Downstream stakeholders start from what they want to see (‘perfectly regular flow of clean water’) and observe a pattern of stream and river flow that doesn’t match their expectations. They search for interventions
on the ‘anthropogenic’ groups of causes (‘deforestation’, ‘degradation’), but need to understand the potential reach of such interventions, given the geological and climatic background. In the absence of knowledge of what happens upstream, an observer of
river flow can deduce a fair amount of information from a time series of river flow data.