Abstract
Socio-economic activities taking place in watersheds usually result in changes to land use that produce modifications on the behaviour of surface streams, which determine the risk level to which residents are exposed to. The objective of this work is to determine a relationship between the magnitude of peak discharges and variations in land cover. The methodology used included the assessment of the hydrological response of a tropical watershed using distributed hydrological modelling to allow for spatial and temporal variations of climatic and morphological conditions. This work was carried out in the Combeima River watershed, in Colombia, South America, where theoretical changes in land use were tested to estimate their impact on peak discharges using probability distributions for flooding events. The simulations conducted were instrumental to determine the variation in the magnitude of flooding peaks with respect to the configuration of land cover
