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MEET A LEAF: ALFREDO HUETE

1/27/2020

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Dr. Alfredo Huete is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.  He leads the Ecosystem Dynamics Health and Resilience research program within the School of Life Sciences.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I think of ecohydrology mainly from the perspective of mechanistically linking vegetation responses to climate variability, such as through trends in water availability, water-use efficiencies, and/or increasing temperatures.  Through my interest in remote sensing, I tend to look at larger scale ecohydrology processes to assess vegetation response rates of different ecosystems to climate variability and extreme events (drought & wet cycles).   Satellite data can reveal useful geospatial information on vegetation dynamics and allow us to assess, pixel by pixel, vegetation productivity at weekly intervals in relation to climate information.  Relative vegetation responses to the same climate inputs can then be used to identify ecologically sensitive areas as well as resilient, or more buffered vegetation areas.  Of course, the best value of satellite data is achieved when coupled with ground information, such as from flux tower sites.  By under­standing vegetation’s responses to current and historical climate variability we can improve predictions of the future consequences of climate change at ecosystem scales and forecast ecosystem collapse and forest mortality.  
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my BSc in Range Management at the University of Arizona in Tucson, after transferring there in my third year of undergraduate studies following the closure of Prescott College in Prescott, Arizona.  I then went to the University of California- Berkeley and completed a MSc in Soil & Plant Biology.  My supervisor was John McColl and my thesis investigated ‘acid rain’ leaching through a series of soils.  After being introduced to a forensics course at UC Berkeley, I became interested in remote sensing and environmental forensics and returned to the University of Arizona to work under Ray Jackson and Don Post in remote sensing.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My degrees in soil, water, and plants and subsequent involvement in remote sensing gradually drew me to the field of ecohydrology.  My Ph.D was a ground-based remote sensing study in cotton fields of the U.S Water Conservation Lab in Phoenix, Arizona under the mentorship of Ray Jackson.  The Lab was at the forefront of water conservation and remote sensing.  Then, as an early career scientist, I completed two summer internships at NASA/ GSFC in Maryland, in which my mission was to translate my knowledge of remote sensing in cotton fields to satellites. This led to my becoming a science team member of the forthcoming NASA-MODIS program. Through this satellite program I once again became involved in field work, as part of satellite algorithm global validation work of the satellite vegetation products I was involved in. 

I was very surprised at how well our satellite vegetation products, such as vegetation indices, could approximate the seasonality of carbon and water fluxes from Fluxnet.  This was true in water-limited semi-arid regions as well as radiation-limited environments as in equatorial Amazon rainforests (although not always true in temperature-limited biomes).  This convinced me that satellite data can be directly used in ecohydrologic studies of the earth system, enabling the Earth to be used as a living lab from which to test hypotheses on climate- vegetation interactions.  From this I have made many satellite phenology studies which I have linked to field ecohydrology, whether through situ flux tower measures, phenocams, or in situ measurements with spectroradiometers.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Ecohydrology has a lot to contribute to climate change research in order for us to understand the rapid changes taking place in seasonally dry ecosystems through the earth.  Understanding changes in vegetation phenology, biodiversity, and productivity can benefit from an ecohydrological understanding of the mechanisms and drivers at play.  Further, ecological forecasting of ecosystem resilience, tree mortality, and land degradation, amidst climate change, benefits from the ecohydrological approach.   
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I am particularly excited with the new and advanced satellite missions, such as the geostationary satellite systems, that have started imaging the earth’s surface, from a fixed point in the sky, continuously at 10 minute intervals.  This massive amount of publicly available free data has opened the doors to conduct ecosystem assessments at diurnal scales, e.g., land surface temperatures and aerosols, that can be coupled to flux tower sites and air quality stations. Other new satellite sensor systems, such as the Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) satellite, the LiDAR measuring Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), and Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2), provide rich and new opportunities to conduct macro-ecohydrology studies at global scales, providing direct measurements of water and carbon in the biosphere and atmosphere.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’ve always been fond of the book by Hans Jenny, “Factors of Soil Formation: A System of Quantitative Pedology”, 1942. Its one of the earliest approaches to Earth System Science, and the 5 factors driving soil formation apply to ecosystem formation and drivers of change.  I also got to know Hans Jenny at UC Berkeley, while a graduate student. He was quiet a remarkable scientist.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like my tree-house style home in northern Sydney, where I go jogging long distances for relaxation and ‘me time’, and on weekends go hiking with family and friends along forest, canyon, and urban trails. At home, I work in the yard doing landscaping and growing vegetables, especially hot chillies.  Bird watching is fun with all the colorful parrots, kookaburras, cockatoos and magpies.  Finally, I have highly talented musical children that keep me busy following their performances in orchestras and string bands throughout the city.
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MEET A LEAF: Benjamin Runkle

1/20/2020

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Dr. Benjamin Runkle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering at the University of Arkansas.
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I always use two hands to explain turbulence!
​What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology represents the bi-directional interaction of the biosphere and the hydrosphere. The more I research the more I see connections between the carbon and water cycles. I study rice fields and their water use and generation of the greenhouse gas methane. Rice has evolved to be flood tolerant, so the fields are flooded to outwit the weeds. Under the anoxic soil conditions, microbes have to develop and end up producing CH4 rather than CO2, so there is a more potent greenhouse gas coming off these fields as a second or third order consequence to this old weed-prevention mechanism. Fortunately, modern rice varieties and careful farm management allow introducing deliberate dry periods and we can dampen CH4 production without bringing on too many weeds or disturbing our rice production. The field becomes an eco-hydrological system under our investigation, and that framing helps in understanding its processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My degrees are all in Civil & Environmental Engineering. I studied environmental engineering out of an interest in nature and water and how to help with the various water issues that affect the world. I had no idea where it would lead me! I now very much enjoying working in a Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering. At Arkansas we focus our department on the sustainability of our food, energy, and water systems. 

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Two of my favorite course in college were “Global Biogeochemical Cycles” and “Ecohydrology”. I realized then that the interfaces of disciplines provide a particularly fascinating space of inquiry. Hydrology is a critical ecological and evolutionary driver; vegetation can also help determine its local hydrology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I believe applied ecohydrology will become increasing critical – such as our work in agro-ecosystem management. To perform any kind of ‘natural carbon solution’ as part of the toolbox against climate change, we need to have a systems perspective on the landscape – one that accounts for ecological and hydrological implications and their interactions. For example plans to plant millions of trees must account for water availability, changes to agricultural systems must consider both photosynthesis and transpiration, and those who re-wet peatlands must account for the special relationship between moss growth and water levels.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’ve always enjoyed the perspectives of my undergraduate Ecohydrology professor, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe. His wonderful piece in WRR in 2000 was written around the time of that course, and its outlook is still so relevant in its emphasis on soil moisture dynamics and the vegetative needs that both derive from and generate that change: Rodriguez-Iturbe, 2000, Ecohydrology: A hydrologic perspective of climate‐soil‐vegetation dynamics, Water Resources Research, 36(1), 3-9, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999WR900210.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I really do like water: I enjoy swimming for exercise and relaxation. I’ve recently started doing some yoga and enjoy the calming benefits of that kind of directed stretching and meditation. About a year ago I also picked up an electronic keyboard and enjoy playing a few songs – my husband’s a punk rock musician and it’s great gift to enjoy music together. 
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MEET A LEAF: Natalie Ceperley

1/13/2020

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Dr. Natalie Ceperley is in the last month of a post-doctoral position at the University of Lausanne, Institute of Earth Surface Processes in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology, in the way that I use it now, is the field that bridges study of the physical and biological processes that govern how water moves through and around our planet in the soil, vegetation, atmosphere across mountains and farms, lakes and rivers.  Conversely, there is a whole community that applies it to the study of the medium (water) that aquatic organisms call home, and in fact that was my first introduction. Additionally, I don’t think we can ever entirely remove people from this story, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve been hoping to coin the term “ethno-eco-hydrology” which I define as the study of how human practices and beliefs shape the vegetation which in turns shapes the hydrologic processes of a landscape.   Someday I hope to do research that truly embodies this field.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a Bachelor’s of Arts in biology from Grinnell College, a Master’s of Environmental Science from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).  I managed to maintain interdisciplinarity with the human and social sciences throughout my education with an interdisciplinary concentration in global development studies at Grinnell, a graduate minor in African Studies at Yale, and being co-housed in the center for cooperation and development at EPFL.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
During my undergraduate aquatic biology class, I did a project studying the ephemeral pools that frogs use as habitat.  I spent most of a semester going out regularly to our experimental prairie and listening for frog calls. I found myself thinking more about the water than the frogs, and particularly how the whole ecosystem was dependent on that seemingly random pooling of water.  Grinnell didn’t offer hydrology and I was out of sync with the only earth science class in the curriculum so I had to pursue my interest in water within the biology curriculum.  That led to an independent project with my aquatic biology professor (Dr. Peter Jacobson) examining the consequences of levy construction on a stand of cottonwood trees in the floodplain of the Rio Grande River with annual growth rings.  During that semester, I became fascinated with the roles of floodplain forests and floods to exchange water and nutrients.  It is this same fascination with biological communities that shape and are shaped by the hydrologic flows that guides my work today. 

Though what happened between my bachelor’s projects and the present might seem a bit random to some people, it was a linear progression of my interest for me at the time.  I spent two years in the Peace Corps in the Islamic Mauritania developing an environmental education curriculum.   As luck would have it, I was stationed in the floodplain of the Senegal River Valley.  During my Peace Corps service, I spent a seemingly infinite number of hours observing the forests and people who live in the floodplain and though a lot about how the management of the up- and downstream dams had changed the ecosystem.  However, I craved more vegetation than the desert could provide, so I moved further south to Benin with a Fulbright grant in the woody savanna and later in the riparian forests of the Oueme River for my Master’s research.   There, I made the connection between forests and trees that people call sacred and (hydrological) ecosystem services. Towards the end of my Master’s, however, I was looking for a more quantitative approach and dove into the other extreme by using eddy-covariance, stable isotopes of water, and a seemingly infinite number of sensors to study land-atmosphere interactions in the same savanna but across the border in Burkina Faso with Dr. Marc Parlange, at EPFL at the time.  I invested a considerable amount of time in a single Sclerocarya birrea tree. As a post-doc, I’ve been involved in two main projects. First, modelling a waterborne disease, schistosomiasis, in Burkina Faso, and, second, an intensive observation of hydrologic process in a high-altitude catchment in the Swiss Alps, using stable isotopes of water among other methods to improve understanding of changing seasonal snow, glacier, and expanding vegetation impacts on downstream flow.  However, my most recent paper (in HESS) was an exciting collaboration with biologists to examine variations in environmental DNA across the catchment.  Sampling DNA is much more labor intensive than stable isotopes!

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Interdisciplinarity is such a mixed blessing. On one hand, it took my whole trajectory to arrive where I am now, but on the other hand, there must be many much more efficient ways to have the tools to answer the questions I ask.  I think my trajectory can confuse people who try to label my expertise (or give me a job).  I’ve been involved in positive and negative, and substantial and superficial interdisciplinary exchanges.  I think as ecohydrolgists we have to learn to glean information from lots of sources but still maintain our expertise.  Sometimes, I find myself reinventing a wheel discovered by soil scientists a century ago or rederiving an equation that geochemists figured out the year I was born.  Thus, I think the challenge in our field is holding the state-of-the-art knowledge of so many different fields in our heads all at once and still looking at things in innovative ways.  We certainly have plenty of questions to answer ahead of us. I hope that we can find the questions that have direct applications that will improve the quality of life on our planet and make life more resilient.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
The first paper I read that captivated my thirst for ecohydrology was Junk, Bayley, and Sparks’ 1989 Flood Pulse Concept.  I think that was before the term “ecohydrology” was coined.  I first encountered the term in Paolo D’Odorico and Amilcare Porporato’s Dryland Ecohydrology book.  I am also very attached to Brutsaert’s book “Evaporation into the Atmosphere” (1982).  I love the way he starts at the very beginning.  I hope that someday I write a book in such an exhaustive way.  Finally, I always return to a paper by Bruijnzeel questioning the impact of upstream tropical deforestation on downstream flows. 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love being outside with almost any means of mobility, but my favorites are ski touring, hiking, swimming in cold water, and biking. That is certainly when I have my best ideas. I also seem to have a never-ending life style that requires me to learn different languages.   Finally, I have a relatively new intensive, long-term child development project that seems to consume most of my non-ecohydrology hours but is a lot of fun.  Perhaps there will be some overlap in the future. Who knows? 
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Meet A lEAF: KIM NOVICK

1/6/2020

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Dr. Kim Novick in an Associate Professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University - Bloomington.  ​@Novick_Lab_IU
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
In my view, ecohydrologists seek to understand the sustainability of ecosystem water, carbon and energy cycles under changing climate and land-use regimes. Like other new and blended disciplines (including biogeochemistry, ecophysiology, and biometereorology), ecohydrology merges concepts from more “classical” fields to tackle research problems that must be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree is in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and my PhD is in environmental science. Both degrees are from Duke University – go Blue Devils!

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I was an undergraduate, my Water Resources Engineering class took a field trip to the Duke Face and AmeriFlux sites. I have to admit, my favorite part of the field trip was the chance to climb one of the flux towers. I thought it might be fun to do that all summer, and luckily Dr. Gaby Katul (who would eventually become my undergrad thesis and PhD advisor) had a summer research position for me.

Eventually, much of my PhD work happened on those towers in the Duke Forest. From Gaby, my lab mates (including Dr. Paul Stoy), and committee members (including Dr. Ram Oren), I learned the fundamentals of hydrology, micro-meteorology, and eco-physiology which govern most of the work my lab does today. As a PhD student, and as a post-doc as the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how the eddy covariance flux measurement technique works, especially in more challenging topographical settings. Now the theory of flux measurements is reasonably advanced, many new tools exist to simplify data processing and distribution, and the continued growth of networks like Fluxnet, AmeriFlux, and NEON give us thousands of sites-years of data to play with. This means we are finally poised do the really fun work of applying flux measurements to study land-atmosphere mass and energy exchanges directly at policy- and management-relevant scales.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think the future of ecohydrology, and other related disciplines, will be much more applied. For decades, my sub-field has been strongly focused on reducing uncertainty in future predictions of land-atmosphere carbon exchange. We haven’t solved that problem yet, but through trying, we’ve gained a lot of highly useful and practical knowledge. For example, we now have a deep understanding of the tradeoffs between carbon uptake and water use at leaf- to watershed- scales. We’ve developed new frameworks for measuring and modeling ways that ecosystems can modify local energy balance and temperature. And especially over the last 5-10 years, we’ve made great strides in understanding how individual species, and their eco-physiological traits, contribute to stand- and watershed-scale dynamics. Much work remains to fully integrate these new paradigms into more certain predictions of future carbon uptake. However, we now know enough to make meaningful and useful contributions to questions about water resources and agricultural sustainability, and the development of resilient forest management strategies. Indeed, there are many examples of eco-hydrologists already engaging in this type of work; moving forward, I think we can expect an onus on us to do more of it.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Well, technically it’s two: Penman (1948) and Monteith (1965), which together describe the Penman-Monteith equation for evapotranspiration. It’s challenging for me to think of a paper my lab has published that doesn’t rely on some variant of this equation. The model is a beautiful blend of principles from thermodynamics and aerodynamics incorporating both abiotic and biotic controls; its applications span the range from theoretical to applied. It’s simple enough to be reproduced in a single line of text and code, yet complicated enough that its predictions and dynamics can still surprise me after 15 years of working with the model.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy chasing after my three kids (ages 10, 3 and 1) in collaboration with my husband Mike. Lately I’ve gotten back into competitive running…something I did a lot of when I was younger. And while I appreciate that this question is looking for answers outside science, I have to say that I have a lot of fun with my job. Every day, I get to try to solve challenging math and science problems, working with great people all over the world; it’s a privilege I feel very lucky to have.
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