Non-vascular vegetation has been shown to capture considerable quantities of rainfall, which may affect the hydrological cycle and climate at continental scales. However, direct measurements of rainfall interception by non-vascular vegetation are confined to the local scale, which makes extrapolation to the global effects difficult. Here we use a process-based numerical simulation model to show that non-vascular vegetation contributes substantially to global rainfall interception. Inferred average global water storage capacity including non-vascular vegetation was 2.7 mm, which is consistent with field observations and markedly exceeds the values used in land surface models, which average around 0.4 mm. Consequently, we find that the total evaporation of free water from the forest canopy and soil surface increases by 61% when non-vascular vegetation is included, resulting in a global rainfall interception flux that is 22% of the terrestrial evaporative flux (compared with only 12% for simulations where interception excludes non-vascular vegetation). We thus conclude that non-vascular vegetation is likely to significantly influence global rainfall interception and evaporation with consequences for regional- to continental-scale hydrologic cycling and climate.

已显示出非维管束植被可捕获大量降雨，这可能会影响大陆范围的水文循环和气候。然而，非维管植物对降雨截留的直接测量仅限于局部范围，这难以外推到全球影响。在这里，我们使用基于过程的数值模拟模型来显示非血管植被对全球降雨的截留有很大贡献。推断的包括非维管植物在内的全球平均储水量为2.7毫米，这与现场观察结果一致，并且明显超过了陆面模型中使用的平均储水量（约0.4毫米）。所以，我们发现，包括非脉管植被时，林冠层和土壤表面的自由水的总蒸发量增加了61％，导致全球降雨截留通量为陆地蒸发通量的22％（而仅12％用于拦截不包括非血管植被的模拟）。因此，我们得出的结论是，非维管束植被可能会显着影响全球降雨的截留和蒸发，从而影响区域到大陆范围的水文循环和气候。