Revealing Invisible Water: Moisture Recycling as an Ecosystem Service
Fig 3
Mato Grosso regional case study and Conceptual Diagram for VMR ecosystem services.
A land-use change scenario that replaces current vegetation with desert land (a), is used to derive the amount of vegetation-regulated evaporation (i.e. VMR sources) for the Mato Grosso region of Brazil (b); the arrows in panel (b) depict annual average wind directions in the lower level of the atmosphere. The region downwind of this VMR source is the VMR sink region, also known as the evaporationshed for Mato Grosso (c). The temporal dynamics of VMR precipitation (d), depicting average, monthly variation between the current (blue) and desert (red) vegetation scenarios are shown alongside the seasonal overlap of important sectors affected by precipitation including the growing season for rainfed maize [36], reservoir filling [37], and seasonal rangeland grazing, with the hashed area indicating decreased quality, wintertime forage [38]. This case study forms the basis for our conceptual framework of VMR ecosystem services (e) running parallel to the Mato Grosso figures.