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.