Dr. Georgianne Moore is a Professor of Ecosystem Science and Management at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Carly Ziter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Concordia University (Montreal, QC).

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology encompasses all of the many ways that water interacts with our ecosystems. Because I tend to work in urban areas these days, I often think about ecohydrology in an urban context. How is water moving through and interacting with these very modified and built-up ecosystems, and what does that mean for the people who live there? How can we design cities to make room for water?
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a BSc in Environmental Biology (Statistics minor) from the University of Guelph, an MSc in Biology and Natural Resource Sciences from McGill University, and a PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Wisconsin Madison.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I actually have limited formal training in hydrology, so it's something I arrived at through years of working in related disciplines of ecosystem and urban ecology (and if I'm honest, being referred to as an "ecohydrologist" can still bring on a little bit of imposter syndrome!).  A large component of my work focuses on understanding multiple ecosystem services (benefits we receive from nature) in urban landscapes. So for me, ecohydrology provides a toolkit that can help me to measure or quantify the water-related benefits provided by urban green space (runoff regulation, flood protection, or water quality regulation, for example). My research requires a lot of breadth, which often means borrowing methods or approaches from other fields. I really love working at this intersection of many fields, but being interdisciplinary also means that I can lack the depth of knowledge that a more disciplinary scientist might have. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to work with great colleagues (including excellent ecohydrologists!) to help refine my methods and ideas throughout the research process.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
As an urban ecologist, I’m particularly interested in work tackling how climate change will alter the hydrology of our cities – and what we may be able to do to buffer these changes. In many cities we are going to experience significant changes in precipitation, from increased drought to more extreme rainfall events. Can we adapt to water-related challenges by changing the composition, configuration, or management of our urban green spaces? How can we integrate nature-based solutions, or “safe to fail” green infrastructure into our cities to accommodate changing precipitation regimes?
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
A paper I return to often is Kate Brauman et al.’s 2007 paper “The Nature and Value of Ecosystem Services: An Overview Highlighting Hydrologic Services”. It’s a wonderful overview of the many ways ecohydrological processes influence ecosystem services.

A more recent paper I enjoyed is “Working towards a more holistic set of hydrologic principles to teach nonhydrologists: Five simple concepts within catchment hydrology” (Shaw et al, Hydrological Processes). As someone who isn’t trained in hydrology but often uses it in my work, I really appreciate papers like this that might clue me in to something fundamental I’ve missed, or correct a misunderstanding I have about the field.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy spending time with friends and family, and like many ecologists I love spending time outdoors in nature when I can. I also really enjoy pursuing more artistic hobbies in my free time. I’ve recently taken up ceramics, so I spend a lot of time at the pottery studio, and I also knit. There’s something about creating tangible objects that I find incredibly refreshing after days spent teaching/coding/writing!

Dr. Bill Shuster is a Hydrologist at the US EPA.  Starting August 1, 2019 he will be Chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

Dr. Jaivime Evaristo is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
The relationship between life and the water[land]scapes that affect it and are affected by it.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? I have a BSc in Biology, major in Cell Biology from the University of the Philippines; MSc in Applied Geosciences, major in Hydrogeology from the University of Pennsylvania under the late Prof. Fred Scatena; and, PhD in Environment and Sustainability, with a concentration in Watershed Hydrology from the University of Saskatchewan under Prof. Jeffrey J. McDonnell. My graduate degrees are easy to relate, one with another. My undergrad degree is, one might say, a bit too far off from the latter two. My undergrad thesis examined histopathological and weight gain effects of different rations of tapioca (starch from the storage roots of cassava) on mice. It involved a lot of optical microscopy work on different mice tissues that lasted for two years. Many years later, I was in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Thailand, Singapore, Arizona, etc. collecting water samples for stable isotope analyses!

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology? During my master’s at Penn, I became interested in isotopic techniques, mostly light stable isotopes. My master’s adviser then suggested a book to me, Isotope Tracers in Catchment Hydrology, edited by Carol Kendall and Jeff McDonnell. And then, I came across this “catchy” title of a paper in the journal Nature, Streamside trees that do not use stream water by Todd Dawson and Jim Ehleringer. Because there was no stable isotopes course at Penn, I cross-enrolled at the University of Utah for two summers in their long-running and widely reputed short courses, IsoCamp, and its geospatial modeling sister, SPATIAL. The book, the paper, and the two courses sealed my interest in all things isotopes, vegetation, and at times, geospatial predilections. What then followed was a series of one luck after another. The greatest of which was when I was accepted to do a PhD in the vibrant lab of Prof. Jeff McDonnell at the University of Saskatchewan.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology? Perhaps, there is a lot of potential for finding ecohydrologic patterns in seemingly disparate datasets [what some people may call emergent phenomena using ‘big data’], either to a degree that disrupts conventional thinking, or simply via a new way of looking at an old problem. I find it interesting though that while there is widespread recognition for the dichotomy between Darwinian and Newtonian approaches in hydrologic research, at times frustrations can be palpable when the former lacks the rigor of constitutive relations that are a characteristic of the latter. I am not sure which of the two is the ‘correct’ approach, assuming that one to the mutual exclusion of another exists. The intellectual debate and differing approaches to hydrologic research are like a spectator sport to me. I enjoy reading about them. On a personal level, I like treading laterally, usually by learning from other fields of science and seeing how their techniques can be applicable to ecohydrology.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain. Too many to mention. I try to learn as much as I can take away from every paper. The more pressing question to me is, how can our reading [hence, acquisition of new knowledge] keep up with the number of papers being published at any given time?

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)? I walk for miles and hours [when it’s not raining in sunny Netherlands!]. Yes, walking can be fun. And, I play the bass guitar when I find one.

Dr. Sujith Ravi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Science at Temple University | Web: http://sites.temple.edu/ravi/ 

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I consider ecohydrology as an interdisciplinary science that studies the mutual interaction between the water cycle and the biosphere, including the human society. The interdisciplinary approach of ecohydrology is important in understanding the impacts of climatic changes and anthropogenic activities on the water resources in the context of global environmental change, land use change, global desertification/land degradation, urbanization, and the food-energy-water nexus.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences from Kerala Agricultural University (India) and an MS and PhD in Environmental Sciences (with specialization in Hydrology) from University of Virginia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My dissertation research (working with Paolo D’Odorico at the University of Virginia) was focused on the ecohydrological and geomorphic feedbacks accompanying vegetation changes in drylands and their impact on soil and water degradation. I was intrigued by the role of vegetation patterns in structuring the water and sediment transport in water-limited systems. As a postdoctoral researcher with Travis Huxman at the University of Arizona, I had the opportunity to expand my research into the ecophysiological underpinnings of drought-induced plant mortality and its implications for desertification. After that I worked with David Lobell at Stanford University on the environmental impacts (on land and water resources) of large-scale solar energy development in drylands and explored the opportunities for integrating solar energy projects with agriculture/biofuels. I think these diverse projects have enabled me to think about research questions at the interface of water, vegetation and human dimensions.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think understanding the role of water in the complex food-energy systems is an important emerging area of ecohydrology. With the rapidly growing population and increasing living standards, providing food and energy services to billions of people with limited (or unreliable) water availability is a critical challenge. To this end, I see an integration of different disciplines including big data analysis, social and behavioral sciences which are valuable in generating new research questions and in developing new methodologies to understand food-energy systems.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
This is a difficult question. I have several papers in mind, but I would like to mention two papers which I came across early on in my graduate program. I think these papers really gave me a broad overview/synthesis of some of the pioneering works exploring the spatial and temporal links among water, vegetation and soil in terrestrial ecosystems, in particular drylands.
Noy-Meyer (1973), Desert Ecosystems: Environment and Producers in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics and Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe (2000), Ecohydrology: A hydrologic perspective of climate‐soil‐vegetation dynamics in Water Resources Research.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like traveling and exploring different cuisines and cultures. I am interested in green initiatives in urban areas, including community gardening, composting and rainwater harvesting.

Dr. Tonantzin Tarin is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Plant & Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is the interaction of biological processes (and organisms) with the water cycle, in terms of use, transport and storage of water.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I started my scientific career at the Sonoran Institute of Technology (ITSON) with Professor Enrico Yépez. My bachelors and masters theses focused on studying evapotranspiration partitioning using stable isotopes and ecosystems flux measurements in the Sonoran desert of northwestern México. During that time, I also had the experience of working with Professor Enrique R. Vivoni working on hydrological models at Arizona State University. These experiences gave me the motivation to pursue a doctoral degree in vegetation dynamics and the carbon and water cycles of semi-arid terrestrial ecosystems.

My Ph.D. research encompassed the study of two iconic semi-arid ecosystems of central Australia: a woodland and a savanna ecosystem (both evergreen ecosystems). I have been fortunate to investigate varying spatial-scales, ranging from leaf to whole ecosystems contrasting (i) plant physiological strategies of co-occurring species, (ii) water-use efficiency, (iii) the stomatal optimization theory and related models. I used eddy covariance data to explore at the ecosystem scale, the relationships among net ecosystem productivity and evapotranspiration with water availability, meteorological variables and vegetation dynamics. At leaf scale, I have studied resource-use efficiencies of multiple co-existing tree species (water-use efficiency, light-use efficiency, and carbon and nitrogen-use efficiencies). These studies combined both intense fieldwork data collection and laboratory analyses across different seasons.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Water. It all started with water. Water is a big issue in my hometown in Sonora as it is a problem in many places around the world. My time at ITSON gave me the opportunity to work and engage in conversations with a group of exceptional hydrologists such as Dr. Jaime Garatuza and Dr. Enrique R. Vivoni, Dr. Julio Rodrigo, and Dr. Christopher Watts. Intense fieldwork campaigns in the Sonora desert brought the relationships among plants, water, and carbon to my attention. Plants can do a lot with a tiny amount of water and become highly productive when water is available, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. By assessing contrasting eco-hydrological behaviors in dominant plant species under field conditions, we can improve our understanding of ecosystem-scale carbon and water fluxes.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
As I mentioned, water is a scare resource especially in semi-arid regions. We need to understand water movement, transport, and use. Societies must be more efficient about water-use and be able to track the water cycle’s components in order to estimate better budgets for better practices and management. Plants can tell us a lot about these concerns! Plants have evolved extreme capabilities for water-use, movement and storage. Additionally, there is an important feedback between vegetation and local climate, for example via evapotranspiration and we should be able to quantify at different scales. Likewise, there is a need of understanding how plants are coping with a changing environment. An improved understanding of current and future eco-hydrological processes is a central component to progress in the development of programs for ecosystem adaptation and mitigation in the face of a changing environment, especially global hydrological change. I think that by studying functional ecological attributes in plants and entire ecosystems (or basin-scale), we will contribute to refining water management in any given region.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One of my favorite papers is entitle “Linking plant and ecosystem functional biogeography” by Markus Reichstein and colleagues (2014). This publication highlights the need to understand plant traits in order to better explain the variation and uncertainties in biogeochemical processes and climate. The paper pointed out interesting needs and current technologies to address questions related to vegetation interactions with land-surface processes. This paper is also highly motivating and encourages collaborative efforts among scientists of different fields to achieve common goals when investigation biogeosciences’ processes. 
  
Reichstein, M., Bahn, M., Mahecha, M.D., Kattge, J., Baldocchi, D.D. (2014). Linking plant and ecosystem functional biogeography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 111, 13697-13702.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I really enjoy being outdoors and training as much as I can. Running has been a good way to explore new areas around my current location(s) as I move between countries and now being a postdoc in the USA. 

Dr. Brent Newman is a scientist in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
An appreciation of the connections between physical and biological processes affecting the movement and availability of water and/or the functioning of plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my BS and MS degrees in Geology from Central Michigan University and the University of Texas at El Paso, respectively. I started doing groundwater hydrology work during my MS. My Ph.D. is in Geochemistry from New Mexico Tech, and during my Ph.D. work I started focusing more on vadose zone hydrology and the ecohydrology of Ponderosa Pine forests and Piñon-Juniper woodlands. During these studies, I started working a lot with environmental tracers especially stable isotopes and chloride. I still use various environmental tracer approaches even though I am working more in Arctic and tropical systems.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Over the years I have had a lot of close interactions with really good ecologists at Los Alamos which I hope rubbed off a bit. Working early on in semiarid systems also emphasized the importance of physical and biological connections. By the time I finished my Ph.D it was really apparent that there was little communication between hydrologists and ecologists and several of us started to work on bridging this gap. In 2000, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe wrote an editorial in Water Resources Research about the need for an ecohydrological science perspective which greatly spurred interest in doing more interdisciplinary research. In 2002, Brad Wilcox, Osvaldo Sala, and I convened an AGU Chapman conference on Ecohydrology and we had a really great group of prominent “ecologists” and “hydrologists” at the meeting. During the conference it was clear that the two camps had some difficulties in communicating and sometimes had different approaches in terms of how they did their science. The outcome of that meeting was a series of papers in the journal Ecology, but also many ecohydrological collaborations were started that are still going on today. It is exciting that since that time Ecohydrology has really become much more mature and visible as a science. I know I am missing some things here, but there have been two more AGU Chapman ecohydrology conferences, a series of HydroEco conferences in Austria, and the establishment of the journals Ecohydrology, and Ecohydrology and Hydrobiology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Linking biogeochemical cycling (including microbes) with more “traditional” plant-water ecohydrological processes.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite ecohydrology paper is Zimmerman et al. (1968). It is a somewhat overlooked paper, but is a great piece of experimental science and was the first one to show lack of fractionation of stable isotopes (d18O and d2H) by plants during root water uptake. It really enabled the use of stable isotopes as ecohydrological tracers.  The paper is not hard to find and you can always get it through the IAEA Water Resources Programme website.

Zimmermann, U., D. Ehhalt, and K.O. Munnich. 1968. Soil-water movement and evapotranspiration: Changes in the isotopic composition of the water. p. 567–584. In Isotopes in Hydrology, Proc. Symp., Vienna. March 1967. IAEA, Vienna.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Ski in winter, flyfish in summer, and brew ciders and beer in between.

Dr. Femeena Pandara Valappil recently defended her PhD at Purdue University and joined the consulting firm BAI Group Inc. in State College, PA as an Engineer. 

Dr. Huade Guan is an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Groundwater Research & Training, College of Science & Engineering, Flinders University, Australia.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To my mind, ecohydrology means the study of interactive processes on land surface that involve both plants and water, their influences on water resources, carbon fluxes, and heat balances, and their responses to environmental changes. As vegetation occurs almost everywhere on the terrestrial surfaces, ecohydrology has broad applications in the management of terrestrial resources and environments, such as water resources, forests, agriculture, and urban environment. 

Physical processes that are investigated in ecohydrology form the core of land surface and atmosphere interactions. Thus, ecohydrology is closely associated with, and often difficult to be distinguished from hydrometeorology. My research area covers both ecohydrology and hydrometeorology. We actually have an acronym for my research group -- EcoH2OMe.

Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary research field. Hydrology and ecophysiology are two obvious important disciplines for ecohydrology. Breadth of knowledge and skills, and cross-discipline research collaborations, are likely more rewarding for ecohydrology than other research fields.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in geochemistry from Peking University, Master’s degree in groundwater from the University of Texas at El Paso, and PhD degree in mountain hydrology from New Mexico Tech. I am happy with the breadth of training I have received in these degrees. My research in ecohydrology has greatly benefited from this training, as well as other knowledge and skills that I picked up on the way of my research until now.

For students in any field of science, if you don’t know yet what to do, come study ecohydrology.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My interest in ecohydrology started at New Mexico Tech, where I did my PhD study with Dr John Wilson. I initially applied for a PhD study at New Mexico Tech mainly because of Tech’s groundwater hydrology ranking (the 4th in 2000). But it seemed that groundwater research at Tech was “surfacing” at that time. John started to look at mountain front recharge, which became my PhD study subject. Dr Fred Phillips was investigating vegetation impacts on groundwater recharge. Two young professors at New Mexico Tech then, Dr Eric Small and Dr Enrique Vivoni, were very active in ecohydrology research.

The landscape surrounding Socorro also helped to shape my interest in ecohydrology. I was fascinated by the clear grass-creosote and creosote-juniper boundaries in Sevilleta, although this was not the focus of my PhD study.

The key driver, pushing me away from hydrogeologically investigating mountain front recharge towards using surface-based approaches (including ecohydrology), was the difficulty in obtaining subsurface data. My PhD study ended up with developing methods to quantify the atmospheric boundary conditions (including both precipitation, potential evaporation and transpiration) over complex terrains, and modelling water partitioning on hillslopes. Development of a dual-source surface energy partitioning model in my PhD study at Tech was probably my first ecohydrology-related research.

I started field-based ecohydrology research in 2010, a couple years after I joined Flinders University.  My students and I investigated the soil-plant continuum with concurrent measurements of sapflow and stem water potential. We hope to characterize root zone and plant hydraulic properties and states based on both measurements, like observation wells and pumping tests in groundwater hydrology. This concept, which I now call “root zone periscope”, has been applied to test and develop root water uptake and transpiration models. The computer program of a vegetation-focused soil-plant-atmosphere model (vSPAC) is now available upon request.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
This is a difficult question. Perhaps the recent ecohydrological separation concept, first proposed by Brooks et al. (2010) in Nature Geoscience, could be one emerging area. Dr Fred Phillips made clear and concise comments on the potential significance of this concept from both theoretical and application aspects, including the implications for catchment hydrology, fertilizer application, and soil remediation.

Understanding and modelling the connections between physical processes and plant mechanistic processes in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum could be another emerging area. Such understanding and modelling capacity are essential to predict vegetation ecosystem responses to changing climates. One example is the recent findings on the impact of the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration on plant stomatal conductance and the consequence on large-scale water balance, published in Nature Climate Change by Dr Yuting Yang and Dr Michael Roderick et al. (2018).

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite ecohydrology paper is McDowell et al. 2018, Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?  published in New Phytologist. In this paper, the authors proposed a concise conceptual framework to explain the contrasting responses of pinon and juniper in the early 2000s drought in New Mexico. The concept links plant drought response to measurable ecohydrological variables. Based on these measurements, plants can be categorized into isohydric and anisohydric species. An isohydric species is more likely to develop carbon starvation, while an anisohydric species tends to develop hydraulic failure in a drought.

More broadly, I like Kirchner 2009, Catchments as simple dynamical systems: Catchment characterization, rainfall-runoff modeling, and doing hydrology backward, published in Water Resources Research. This paper demonstrates how the catchment water balance components can be resolved based on time series streamflow data only. I find the philosophic support in this paper for my own research approach in ecohydrology – conceptualizing the system in such a way that it can be investigated by easily obtainable data.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
When I have spare time, I like to walk and listen to music. But I don’t know much about music. A student once found that I kept listening to the same couple of songs for a whole semester! 

Dr. Lizzie Gardner is an Aquatic Ecologist at the global independent design, engineering and architectural firm, Arup and a Postgraduate Research Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.