The partitioning of precipitation between blue water, defined as runoff generation, and green water, representing water consumption by vegetation, determines the availability of surface water resources for human activities and freshwater ecosystems (Rulli et al., 2013). Green water is the largest fraction globally (Wang & Dickinson, 2012), but is challenging to quantify (Mueller et al., 2013). Modeling studies suggest a general increase in green water in recent decades, as a consequence of higher plant leaf area (Forzieri et al., 2020;Zeng et al., 2018), longer vegetative periods (Lian et al., 2020), and greater atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) (Vicente-Serrano, McVicar et al., 2020).The total vegetation coverage controls the relationship between total evaporation and total precipitation at the catchment scale (Zhang et al., 2001). This would explain how hydrological processes are impacted by changes in leaf area index and plant biomass (Forzieri et al., 2020;Zeng et al., 2018) and the replacement of plant species through secondary succession (Leuschner & Rode, 1999). Studies indicate that reduced tree coverage increases runoff generation after disturbances (Bosch & Hewlett, 1982) since after reduction of the dominant vegetation of a catchment, evaporation is usually reduced (Anderegg et al., 2016;Wine et al., 2017;Winkler et al., 2017). Overall, re-afforestation practices and natural secondary succession reduce runoff production (Filoso et al., 2017), although the magnitude of change is highly dependent on the
