Changes in the water balance of the Samin catchment (277.9 km 2 ) on Java, Indonesia, can be attributed to land use change using the Soil Water Assessment Tool model. A baseline-altered method was used in which the simulation period 1990-2013 was divided into 4 equal periods to represent baseline conditions (were acquired from satellite images. A Soil Water Assessment Tool model was calibrated for the baseline period and applied to the altered periods with and without land use change. Incorporating land use change resulted in a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.7 compared to 0.6 when land use change is ignored. In addition, the model performance for simulations without land use change gradually decreased with time. Land use change appeared to be the important driver for changes in the water balance. The main land use changes during 1994-2013 are a decrease in forest area from 48.7% to 16.9%, an increase in agriculture area from 39.2% to 45.4%, and an increase in settlement area from 9.8% to 34.3%. For the catchment, this resulted in an increase of the runoff coefficient from 35.7% to 44.6% and a decrease in the ratio of evapotranspiration to rainfall from 60% to 54.8%. More pronounced changes can be observed for the ratio of surface runoff to stream flow (increase from 26.6% to 37.5%) and the ratio of base flow to stream flow (decrease from 40% to 31.1%), whereas changes in the ratio of lateral flow to stream flow were minor (decrease from 33.4% to 31.4%). At sub-catchment level, the effect of land use changes on the water balance varied in different sub-catchments depending on the scale of changes in forest and settlement area.

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Changes in the stream flow of the Samin catchment (277.9 km2) in Java, Indonesia, have been attributed to land use change and climate change. Hydroclimatic data covering the period 1990–2013 and land use data acquired from Landsat satellite imageries for the years 1994 and 2013 were analysed. A quantitative measure is developed to attribute stream flow changes to land use and climate changes based on the changes in the proportion of excess water relative to changes in the proportion of excess energy. The results show that 72% of the increase in stream flow might be attributed to land use change. The results are validated by a land use change analysis and two statistical trend analyses namely the Mann-Kendall trend analysis and Sen's slope estimator for mean annual discharge, rainfall and potential evapotranspiration. The results of the statistical trend analysis are in the same direction as the results of the attribution analysis, where climate change was relatively minor compared to significant land uses change due to deforestation during the period 1994–2013. We conclude that changes in stream flow can be mainly attributed to land use change rather than climate change for the study catchment.