DATA AND METHODS

Study Area and Data

We investigated the relationship between the effective and the topographic area of 733 catchments in Brazil (Figure 1). The country comprises six biomes with a climate that varies from semiarid to subtropical with annual precipitation ranging from about 400 to 4,000 mm. Elevation ranges from sea level up to 2,900 m. In this study, we used the Catchment Attributes for Brazil dataset (CABra) (Almagro, Oliveira, Meira Neto, Roy, & Troch, 2020) for the analysis detailed throughout the next sections. CABra is a large-scale dataset for catchment attributes, comprising a set of several multi-scale attributes for 735 Brazilian catchments. Moreover, the dataset provides daily time series of climate and streamflow for a 30-year period (1980-2010). The dataset allows for multiple uses and scales supporting the decision-making process by providing eight main classes of catchment attributes: topography, climate, streamflow, groundwater, soil, geology, land cover, and hydrological disturbance. We excluded from our analyses two catchments; one presented inconsistency between precipitation and evapotranspiration data while the other was highly disturbed by human activities such as inter-catchment water transfer.