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MEET A LEAF: Kyle Blount

1/25/2021

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Dr. Kyle Blount (he/they) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Urban Ecohydrology at Washington State University – Vancouver. Twitter: @hydro_kyleb
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As many others have noted, ecohydrology is a “big tent” term that incorporates many disciplines and varied approaches. To me, ecohydrology is fundamentally about understanding the interactions between ecosystems, especially plants, and the water cycle. I advocate that the tent of ecohydrology should remain large and incorporate new, complementary perspectives as the field evolves. This openness provides a necessary interdisciplinarity that will lead to unique and more efficient understandings of the systems that we, as ecohydrologists, study.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my B.S. in Environmental Geosciences from Texas A&M University and both my M.S. and Ph.D. in Hydrology from the Colorado School of Mines.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I began my undergraduate education, I had just finished a year in East Africa that motivated my interests in environmental issues and water resources, specifically. During undergraduate research, these interests evolved into a project on the impacts of land use/land cover change on hydrology and flooding. As I entered grad school, I continued these interests in landscape disturbance and hydrology as I began working on a project examining the ecohydrological impacts of wildfire on the water budget partitioning (though I only became familiar with the term “ecohydrology” after beginning this project). As I completed the wildfire work, my funding sources changed, and I have worked more in urban areas from the end of my graduate research into my postdoc appointment. Specifically, my work has examined how climate change, land cover change, and urban redevelopment influence outdoor water use and how evolving urban landscapes influence water-heat-vegetation interactions. Though these interests are varied, I now see them connected through the umbrella of ecohydrology – how plants and water interact across changing landscapes through time.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Hydrology itself has evolved over the last few decades to include more focus on human components of the water cycle (i.e., the socio-hydrology paradigm and a greater focus on urban areas). Though fundamental understandings in ecohydrology in “natural” (i.e., non-urban) environments are still essential to pursue as research questions, I believe there is room for ecohydrology to begin to incorporate more applied research by incorporating human systems and moving more into urban study sites. Much of my research occurs in human-altered landscapes, and the alterations of these landscapes can fundamentally change the ecohydrological behavior of these systems. In the same way, the function of these systems may fundamentally change the human interactions with them (e.g., more dense urban development may reduce evapotranspiration and intensify urban heat islands, affecting human health and comfort). Finally, a focus on ecohydrology in urban systems, due to urban heat islands, can help us understand what to expect in future (warmer) climates and how climate change may alter ecohydrology in non-urban landscapes.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
There are almost too many to pick from, but I will highlight one of my favorites from some friends and colleagues that hits on some of my favorite topics (urban irrigation, vegetation, climate patterns, remote sensing, and creative big data integration):
Quesnel, K. J., Ajami, N., & Marx, A. (2019). Shifting landscapes: Decoupled urban irrigation and greenness patterns during severe drought. Environmental Research Letters, 14(6). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab20d4
This paper presents exciting insights into how irrigated urban vegetation behaves during drought and demonstrates that climate patterns more strongly control the greenness of urban vegetation than does irrigation water use.


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
When I am not working, I like to spend time hanging out with my dog, Gus. I enjoy many active and outdoor recreational activities including hiking, camping, skiing, swimming, running, and working out. I enjoy baking and reading, and (in non-COVID times) I enjoy visiting breweries and coffee shops.
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MEET A LEAF: Anne Verhoef

1/18/2021

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Dr. Anne Verhoef is a Professor in Soil Physics and Micrometeorology in Department of Geography and Environmental Science, The University of Reading, United Kingdom.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I must admit I rarely call myself an ecohydrologist, or a hydrologist for that matter, despite the fact that a large part of my research looks at the interactions and feedbacks between ecological processes and the hydrological cycle. Nor do I seek out ecohydrological conferences or workshops: I am an omnivorous kind of scientist and anything goes as long as it touches upon the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and how it interacts with the hydrological cycle.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I did a combined BSc/MSc degree in Soil Science, at the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands. I specialized in Soil Physics, because it immediately appealed to me with its clear links to hydrology, meteorology and ecology. I am one of those few lucky people who realized quite early on what their vocation was: I decided to study Soil Science when I was around 15 years old. My PhD was in Micrometeorology, also in Wageningen, under the supervision of Henk de Bruin. I was really interested in the interactions in the soil-plant-atmosphere system, so this seemed a logical next step in my scientific career.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
This really was during my PhD fieldwork in Central Spain and Niger, during the EFEDA (ECHIVAL Field Experiment in a Desertification Threatened Area) and HAPEX-Sahel (Hydrologic Atmospheric Pilot EXperiment in the Sahel) campaigns in 1991 and 1992, respectively. These were international studies with all kinds of scientists involved, including (ecohydrologists). We learned a great deal from each another and I have very fond memories of those campaigns and related workshops. More recently, I have greatly enjoyed working on the Oxford (UK) floodplains to study the sensitivity of communities of rare plant species, including the Snakeshead fritillary, to small changes in groundwater levels. I also had the privilege to be involved in a project on Caatinga dryland forest ecosystems in the semi-arid area of Northeastern Brazil. The intricate ways in which the many tree-and shrub species in these forests interact with the environment, in particular the very limited soil water stores, and with each other is fascinating. The big challenge is how to model this comprehensively.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am not an expert in this particular area, but the use of stable Isotopes in Ecohydrology have already brought us important new insights. Now the challenge lies in further developing and testing in situ methods (such as those that sample soil water vapor) to capture the temporal dynamics in the isotopic signature of the various hydrological compartments. Another challenge is how to incorporate this information reliably into ecohydrological and land surface models. I also think there is still scope for further exploring coupled heat and water transport experiments and related modelling, especially with distributed temperature sensing becoming more widely available.
Finally, models that use optimization theory and mechanistic approaches of plant water transport and photosynthesis will help us to get a better handle of the effects of plant water stress on vegetation functioning under changing climatic conditions.

 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I rarely read pure ecohydrological papers, but there are a number written by Simone Fatichi and colleagues on ecohydrological modelling that I greatly enjoyed.  I am more familiar with the seminal papers in the micrometeorological arena (e.g., on turbulence in plant canopies) that also cross over to plant physiology, such as those by Finnigan, McNaughton, Monteith and Raupach. The papers by J.R. Philip (1927-1999), an Australian soil physicist and hydrologist, are close to my heart because he made both his mark on micrometeorology (e.g., advection, evaporation, canopy resistances) as well as on soil physics (infiltration).

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Unfortunately, there is generally very little time left for fun stuff, but I really enjoy hiking, brushing up on or learning new languages (this is also a good excuse to watch foreign-language Netflix series in the evenings), and anything to do with the architecture and applied arts of the Art Nouveau period.

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MEET A LEAF: Arial Shogren

1/11/2021

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Dr. Arial Shogren is an NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow for Research in Biology (PRFB) at Michigan State University & Visiting Scholar at the University of Alabama. @DrArialShogren
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I love how broad and interdisciplinary the term “ecohydrology” is, hence the many definitions from other AGU Leafs that have been featured prior. To me, it is a field that describes the many ways that water and life interact, almost like describing the intricate moves or setting of a dance. Some scientists might describe the complex footwork (e.g., where water is moving, from plants, to within the hyporheic zone, to surface-water groundwater interactions), while others might characterize the music (e.g., how climatic conditions drive hydrologic and biogeochemical fluxes), or even focus on the dancers themselves (e.g., which solutes or materials are being transported and transformed). This is an imperfect analogy... But the point being that all together, these aspects generate a clearer vision of how the world works. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
Both of my degrees are in biology! I received my Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Vassar College, which is a small liberal arts college. I then pursued my Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at The University of Notre Dame. 

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
From a very young age, I knew I wanted to do something related to ecology, so I pursued biology degrees in undergrad and grad school. While ecology is my “bread and butter,” I started thinking about how hydrology influences and is influenced by ecology when I was a first year PhD student at Notre Dame. I started asking research questions about the abiotic and biotic conditions that drive material transport in stream reaches. While these questions were fundamentally ecological in nature, because the research setting was in flowing streams, I had to understand how and where water was moving. A significant part of my graduate training was understanding and applying the math behind stream spiraling and other transport models, which was a fun challenge. As a post-doc, I’ve gotten to expand these questions to a new system, but at the core of my research is using ecology and hydrology to unravel how their interactions manifest in rivers. And as I keep moving forward in my career, the research that I am passionate about falls somewhere in the interdisciplinary space between hydrology and ecology. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
One thing that I’ve learned during my time as a post-doc at MSU is to “mind the gap” – to find out what we as scientists might be missing by ignoring relevant spatial scales, under-studying certain periods of time, or by only using a single perspective to study a problem, for example. I think it’s important for ecohydrologist to ask “what are we missing?”. Not only does asking this question help present new ways to fill the evident knowledge and data gaps and improve our understanding of the “dance” I mentioned above, but it’s also an exciting way of finding new research topics and questions! It’s especially fruitful for focusing research efforts in remote or understudied regions, and finding new ways to solve problems.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It’s hard to pick just one! Recently, I’ve been loving the paper in Geophysical Research Letters by Marinos et al. (2020): Is the River a Chemostat? I keep coming back to this manuscript as it empirically tests assumptions related to what is driving nutrient export. The paper elegantly shows that a combination of terrestrial/landscape and instream processes control nitrate export in the Mississippi River Basin, but that there’s scale-dependence on the patterns that you see at a watershed outlet. It’s an interesting take on where you measure determining your story.  

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
This is a great question. Like many other ecohydrologists, my science is inspired by what I do outside of work. I’m passionate about getting outside, I love hiking, cycling, paddling, running, etc. In the before-covid times, I’d road-trip across the country to visit state and national parks, always “river-necking” (looking at rivers from my car) along the way. With covid restricting travel and events this year, I’ve found a greater appreciation for my local surroundings, and exploring the beautiful places within a few hours of my home in Alabama. I also have three rescue dogs (Lolly, Lucy, and Lester), and they keep me entertained. 
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MEET A LEAF: W.J. "Jim" Shuttleworth

1/4/2021

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Before his passing on December 20th 2020, Dr. W.J. “Jim” Shuttleworth was a Regents Professor Emeritus in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona. 
This leaf was drafted by Shirley Papuga (co-taught Practical and Applied Hydrometeorology with Jim at University of Arizona) and Rafael Rosolem (Jim’s final PhD student) in his honor. 
Leave a memory here.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Jim considered himself a hydrometeorologist - linking climate science and weather prediction with hydrologic science.  However, many of us remember Jim for his valuable contributions to the ecohydrology community.  For example, Jim was instrumental in the development of Hydra, an early version of what is known these days as the “eddy covariance system” - one of our ecohydrological go-to tools for bridging hydrological and ecological processes.  It was this system that enabled some of the early work on energy and water cycles linking eddy covariance data in the Amazon rainforest with land surface models that led to subsequent improvements in Global Climate Models.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
Jim received his Bachelors degree with honors in Physics in 1967, a U.S. Master’s equivalent (Dip. Adv. St. Sc.) with distinction in 1968,  and his PhD in High-Energy Nuclear Physics in 1971, all from Manchester University.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
It was not long after receiving his PhD that Jim shifted to using the science and mathematics skills he developed studying high-energy physics to address questions in the hydrologic sciences.  One of the first topics he tackled was evaporation.  In their 1979 paper “Has the Priestley-Taylor Equation Any Relevance to Forest Evaporation?”, Jim with Ian Calder  challenged “the indiscriminate use of the Priestly-Taylor hypothesis”, “a simple and easily calculable function of temperature and radiant energy, independent of precipitation and only weakly related to vegetation cover”.  They used empirical datasets from two forest ecosystems to argue that vegetation, especially if it is tall, can have a significant impact on evaporative fluxes that are not reflected in the Priestly-Taylor or Penman formulas.  This paper has helped set the stage for emphasizing to  meteorologists, hydrologists, and water engineers the importance of vegetation in their applications.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Even with a lifetime of continuous innovative disciplinary research contributions, probably one of the most important emerging areas that Jim had a major influence on was highlighting the importance of the interface between hydrology and other disciplines. His inclusive and curious approach to learning has helped develop a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists that have moved beyond their established boundaries by enabling them to incorporate hydrologic principles in broadening their thinking.  

In 2006, Jim was recognized with the International Hydrology Prize.  As part of his response to the award citation Jim stated: “If, as stated in the citation, I have helped to raise consciousness of the need to improve communication between the physical and biological sciences and the human sciences, and of the need for the directed deployment of hydrological understanding in support of societal needs, this is a further source of pride to me.”  Our best guess is that Jim would argue that continuing to make progress in bridging hydrology and biology for addressing societal needs is an important emerging area of research.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It is hard to choose a single paper from Jim’s vast contribution to the scientific community. His knowledge is for example well summarized for hydrologists in Chapter 4 of the Handbook of Hydrology, appropriately called “Evaporation”, or his more recent “Terrestrial Hydrometeorology” book, which became widely considered to be the definitive textbook on the subject. However, for us, the Shuttleworth et al. 1984 paper perhaps best captures the essence of Jim’s work and overall contribution to the community. Here is why:

First, it highlights the pioneering use of eddy correlation measurements for turbulent fluxes estimates in the Amazon rainforest. We are now used to easily accessing data from many flux sites across the whole world. Back in the 1980’s, this technology was still in its infancy, and setting up a field work in the Amazon forest was obviously challenging. Yet, despite all adversities, Shuttleworth et al. 1984 introduced the first 8 ‘golden’ days of measured fluxes from the Reserva Ducke near Manaus, Brazil. Up until then, most of these studies had occurred in temperate latitudes due to “finance and practicality” as stated in the paper. Below is the excerpt from the paper highlighting its key findings which are now well-accepted in ecohydrology:

“In the phraseology of classical hydrology, the experimental situation in which the data presented in this paper were gathered represents 'evaporation from a well-watered crop'. The meteorologist and hydrologist schooled in the concept of potential evaporation might therefore be surprised by the result (given in section 4(b)), that the fraction of incoming radiant energy used in evaporation for a transpiring forest canopy is around 0.7. To the forest hydrometeorologist this result is entirely plausible, and not unexpected (cf. Shuttleworth and Calder 1979). It reflects the fact that transpiring forest canopies exert significant surface control even when water is freely available in the soil.” 

Secondly, the paper ends with a proposed working model of daily evaporation for forest surfaces. This reflects Jim’s contributions to both experimental and modeling aspects of hydrometeorology. Contributions like that ultimately led to multi-national collaborative projects such as the Anglo–Brazilian Amazonian Climate Observational Study (ABRACOS) and the Large-scale Biosphere-atmosphere experiment in Amazonia (LBA) projects, both with strong leadership contributions made by Jim.

Finally, the third reason is to highlight Jim’s ability to work internationally and to recognize his pivotal role in providing guidance and support to international colleagues and students, especially to the Brazilian community. Jim has certainly contributed to the career of many international scientists over the decades through his collaborations or by hosting and advising international students. Those who have worked closed with Jim always recognize his kindness, friendliness and supportive role as a collaborator, mentor, or advisor.


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
It is clear to us from his words and actions that Jim was a devoted family man.  He referred to his wife Hazel as his best friend and acknowledged her whenever he was honored with an award.  Jim supported his four sons in football [soccer] and later his daughter’s ballet.  In fact, Jim became so involved that he actually became part of the Tucson Regional Ballet performing for several years in the Southwest Nutcracker, which many of us were fortunate to be able to witness!  After his retirement he rolled up his sleeves and was actively involved in Habitat for Humanity - it seemed natural for Jim to serve his community, no matter the context.   We will remember Jim as a smiling face, never too busy to sit down and share a caipirinha with us.  Saúde Jim!  
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Links that remember Jim Shuttleworth:
2001 AGU Hydrology Section Award 
2002 EOS Article Featuring Jim
2006 IAHS, UNESCO, and WHO International Hydrology Prize Citation and Response
2009 University of Arizona Regents’ Professor Tribute (Video)
2011 AGU Langbein Lecture (Video)
2013 AMS Robert E. Horton Lecturer in Hydrology
2014 AGU Robert E. Horton Medal 
2015 EOS Article Featuring Jim
2020 Ameriflux Memoriam - Remembering Professor Jim Shuttleworth
2020 History of Hydrology Biography
2020 Jim Shuttleworth Memorial 
2020 Dec 29 Tucson Memorial Service (Video)


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