The Water Survey of Canada (WSC) maintains the Reference Hydrometric Basin Network (RHBN) which is a set of gauged watersheds with long records and minimal human impacts that are deemed appropriate for climate change studies. An important disclaimer about the RHBN is that changes to forest cover, such as harvesting and wildfire, are not considered in the station selection methodology. Changes in forest cover can alter streamflow regimes; therefore, accounting for potential forest change is critical when trying to isolate and draw robust conclusions about climate change impacts on streamflow. The objective of our study was to assess how much land cover has changed across the forested RHBN catchments during the period of 1984 to 2019. We leverage forest change estimates from the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System for Canada (Hermosilla et al., 2016, 2022) to estimate change for RHBN watersheds across the forest region of Canada. Although many RHBN basins had relatively stable land cover over the 1984-2019 period, some basins underwent considerable change (up to 30-50% of their catchment area) in both total forest cover, as well as dominant forest type (e.g., coniferous vs deciduous vs mixedwood). Follow up efforts will assess whether documented land cover changes could have altered streamflow regimes in these watersheds. This work highlights the value in merging knowledge from the forest remote sensing community with the hydrology community to inform future watershed management in Canada.