Flood damage reflects insufficient adaptation of human presence and activity to location and variability of river flow in a given climate. Flood risk increases when landscapes degrade, counteracted or aggravated by engineering solutions. Efforts to maintain and restore buffering as an ecosystem function may help adaptation to climate change, but this require quantification of effectiveness in their specific social-ecological context. However, the specific role of forests, trees, soil and drainage pathways in flow buffering, given geology, land form and climate, remains controversial. When complementing the scarce heavily instrumented catchments with reliable long-term data, especially in the tropics, there is a need for metrics for data-sparse conditions. We present and discuss a flow persistence metric that relates transmission to river flow of peak rainfall events to the base-flow component of the water balance. The dimensionless flow persistence parameter F_p is defined in a recursive flow model and can be estimated from limited time series of observed daily flow, without requiring knowledge of spatially distributed rainfall upstream. The F_p metric (or its change over time from what appears to be the local norm) matches local knowledge concepts. Inter-annual variation in the F_p metric in sample watersheds correlates with variation in the flashiness index used in existing watershed health monitoring programmes, but the relationship between these metrics varies with context. Inter-annual variation in F_p also correlates with common base-flow indicators, but again in a way that varies between watersheds. Further exploration of the responsiveness of F_p in watersheds with different characteristics to the interaction of land cover and the specific realisation of space–time patterns of rainfall in a limited observation period is needed to evaluate interpretation of F_p as an indicator of anthropogenic changes in watershed conditions.