Impacts of land cover changes on watershed hydrology have been a long-term academic concern with acute dispute. But little attention has been paid to such effects on mesoscale river basins, where the society has a closer link to river hydrology. The present study focuses on a mesoscale river basin, the Suomo Basin that is located on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Land covers in the basin in the years 1970, 1986 and 1999 were mapped. A lumped hydrologic model, CHARM, and a distributed hydrologic model, SWAT, were used to model the impacts of both land-cover change and climate variation on river runoff during the past four decades. The results show that the contribution of climate variation to the change of runoff regime makes up 60%-80%, while that of land cover changes only 20%.