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Schlagwörter:
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Zusammenfassung:
Global discharge regimes are strongly affected by multiple environmental drivers. It remains a
challenge to relate their contributions and complex spatio‐temporal cause‐effect chains to a given time and
location. To disentangle these relationships, we combined 12 environmental variables with changes in more
than 25,000 discharge time series globally and identified the variable importance across climate zones using
random forest analyses. The results show that (a) about two‐thirds of the global catchments experienced
significant changes in discharge between 1980s and 1990s and (b) more than 80% of the basins with new dams
built during the study period have experienced changes, twice as many as basins without dams. Furthermore, (c)
most environmental variables were subject to significant changes, especially precipitation, temperature and
urban land cover; (d) strong changes in the discharge regime were mostly associated with precipitation,
followed by land cover changes, and (e) impacts of water infrastructure are dominant in basins with weak
evidence of change in discharge. Our findings highlight the contribution of each individual environmental factor
on global discharge regimes and can be used to inform water‐related studies and global modeling efforts in the
future.
