William Laurance, in his News & Views article 'Forests and floods' (Nature 449, 409-410; 2007), highlights a paper by C. Bradshaw and colleagues, claiming that it provides correlative evidence that native forests reduce the frequency and severity of floods in developing countries. The 'forest and floods' debate goes back at least to the nineteenth century. Now forest hydrologists generally agree that, although forests mitigate floods at the local scale and for small to medium-sized flood events, there is no evidence of significant benefit at larger scales and for larger events.
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