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Meet A Leaf: LeeAnn Haaf

1/31/2022

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LeeAnn Haaf is a PhD candidate in environmental science at Drexel University and the Wetlands Coordinator for the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Water is such an essential part of the natural world! I spend a lot of my time studying the estuarine environment, where tidal ranges, flooding, saltwater and freshwater shape many of the ecological communities. Ecohydrology, to me, represents the intimate and dynamic relationships that make these coastal communities unique and dynamic.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I attended Drexel University for my Bachelors and Masters in Environmental Science, and now also a PhD candidate there.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
It is tough to avoid thinking about ecohydrology when standing knee deep in the muck of intertidal wetlands! Coastal systems are usually in various stages of change. Sea level rise and climate change add more complexity (and variability) to these systems. Since intertidal wetlands, and even low-lying habitats such as forests, are shaped by where, how, and even when water moves, it’s simply not something you can leave out of the equation when studying how these systems operate—or how they might fare into the future.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Given my coastal bias, one important emerging area of ecohydrology is getting a better sense of how sea level rise will affect currently seldom or unflooded areas. This includes forests, as well as developed areas and farmlands. There’s already been some research on this topic, but there is still a lot of variability in these systems that limit our ability to predict when/how transitions from drier uplands to intertidal areas will occur—and at what cost. I’m currently using tree rings to begin answering questions about how coastal flooding affects tree growth, and how we can use this information to help managers design (or redesign) coastal adaption plans. There are many specifics we still need to know about “sea level succession”!

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Early on, I was very inspired by the 1995 Ecological Applications paper “Chloride Concentrations in Growth Rings of Taxodium Distichum in a Saltwater-Intruded Estuary” by Yanosky, Hupp, and Courtney. The study found evidence of increasing chloride concentrations in growth rings of bald cypresses along an estuarine gradient. In a broader context, these findings show (at a chemical level!) that salt intrusion caused by sea level rise has a detectable and possibly subtle (where acute mortality does not seem to occur) affect on the coastal environment. By tracing these affects from the past (tree rings, sediment cores), we can get a better sense of how changes in the hydrological environment will shape future coastal habitats. This opens so many doors for research and learning something that benefits the people and habitats that occupy coastal areas (in 2018, approximately 40% of the U.S. people live along its coasts!).
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love working with and riding horses. Winston Churchill once said “no hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle”—I couldn’t agree more!
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MEET A LEAF: Benjamin Keenan

1/17/2022

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Benjamin Keenan is a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Researching palaeohydrology and the ways that humans responded to climatic and environmental change in the past can provide reference points and insights for contemporary and future responses to anthropogenic environmental change.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
MGeol Geological Sciences
PhD Biogeochemistry

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I am researching changing vegetation and climate in Central America using isotope analyses of plant wax n-alkanes. The lowland Maya people are thought to have abandoned their population centres as a result of drought. I think about the interactions between water and ecological systems in the past, today and in the future. For a proxy calibration project I collected well waters from residential buildings in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala and loved getting to talk about water access and quality, and getting to know the people living there. I like swimming in lakes and I want people to enjoy clean water.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Looking at human and non-human interactions in the past can be an interesting lens through which we can look at approaches to contemporary questions, including ecohydrological ones. The novel application of proxies to lake sediments, for example, reveals changes in vegetation, water availability, demography, and fire-use over thousands of years. “Where archaeology cannot go…..”

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I like papers that use novel approaches to solving problems, especially problems of understanding the past… “Not a bathtub: A consideration of sea-level physics for archaeological models of human migration,” a paper by Marisa Borreggine in the Journal of Archaeological Science looks at reconstructing past sea level to better understand how people interacted with landscapes and human migration in the past.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy eating and cooking for friends, gardening, and jazz. I also like to stretch my legs…..i’ve spent the past few years tour biking all over the beautiful province of Québec, where the people and the bike paths are like nowhere else. Quel plaisir!
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MEET A LEAF: Lin Meng

1/10/2022

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Dr. Lin Meng is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Twitter: @Linmengmet. Website: https://menglinmet.wixsite.com/meng
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me means understanding the relationship between water and vegetation at various scales and how this relationship changes under the changing environments (e.g., drought and heatwave). This includes many processes, for example the loss of water through the tiny pores in leaves. Ecohydrology integrates processes and mechanisms from soil, plants, and atmosphere together, providing a unique lens to understand land-atmosphere interaction through plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received an undergraduate degree from Shenyang Agricultural University, China, a master degree from Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, China, and a PhD from Iowa State University, USA. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where I am studying forest-atmosphere exchange of carbon, water, and energy in Amazonia.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I got interested in ecohydrology through studying phenology during my PhD (Check out my award essay Green with Phenology in Science). The timing when trees leaf-out or falling leaves affected the timing and magnitude of transpiration throughout the year. This phenological feedback on water cycle brought me to NGEE-Tropic project (https://ngee-tropics.lbl.gov/) last year as a postdoc at Berkeley Lab. From there, I started to look at processes associated with large-scale forest-atmosphere exchange of water in Amazonia. I am currently focusing on applying ecological and plant physiological theory to explore mechanistic process of evapotranspiration during droughts and how it responds to soil moisture and temperature stress. Check out my 2021 AGU presentation. I also run and parameterize the ELM-FATES and E3SM (the DOE land and Earth system models) to simulate water cycles of Amazon evergreen forests.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
New satellite data at high spatial and temporal resolutions will provide many exciting opportunities to study ecohydrological processes. For example, ECOSTRESS measure the canopy temperature heating up as the plants run out of water, to better understand how much water plants need and how they respond to changing environment at a 70m spatial resolution on a daily basis. Understanding diurnal pattern of ecohydrological processes at a large scale is critical to improve models and accurately predict how ecosystem respond under future climate change.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I enjoy reading many papers on ecohydrology but one of my favorites is Mechanisms linking drought, hydraulics, carbon metabolism, and vegetation mortality by Nate McDowell. This paper talks about the underlying mechanism that drives the hydraulics failure and carbon starvation, therefore provide an integrated view on the drought-induced mortality. Drought is the dominate driver on tree mortality, but drought interacts with many other factors like temperature and light in affecting trees. This paper gives me a clear view and helps me understand the complex processes that happen during the drought. And there are many processes that we don’t fully know yet.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy going for a walk, or for a hike in the nature when I am not doing research. I also run half marathons and photograph in my free time. Photography allows me to discover the beauty of world I live in and appreciate nature.
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MEET A LEAF: Indira Paudel

1/3/2022

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Indira Paudel is a Post-doctoral research associate at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology means vegetation response to soil and atmospheric climate for water. It is all about how plants influence water resources and how water availability affects the functioning and services of plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.Sc.(2010) in Agriculture specialization in Soil science and Agri-engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal.  After my undergraduate program, I moved to Israel for a Diploma in High-tech Agriculture, then joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Rehovot for my graduate degrees [M.Sc. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018)] in soil and water sciences.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The world is changing rapidly and unpredictably, and plant productivity has been declining, primarily because of the limitation of water resources.  As global warming intensifies, so are trees and forests' water needs. We need to improve our understanding of increasing water use efficiency to a future environmental condition.  In my graduate research career, I wanted to improve the water productivity of tree crops in arid regions. With time, I started to release the border impact of ecohydrology in the future of global environmental change. I am currently interested in improving our understanding and minimizing future projections of ecohydrological feedback on the forested ecosystem. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Recent research has focused on climate extremes, but minimal attention has been given to the effects of chronic environmental changes in eco-hydrological processes. For years, ecohydrology has been less studied due to high temporal and spatial heterogeneity in soils, vegetation, and climate patterns across the scales. The evolution of high thoughtful sensing technology and remote sensing products has resulted in an explosion of applications relevant to managing and monitoring natural resources. Combined, data availability and increased computing power have opened the door for modeling and studying ecohydrological patterns at larger scales to inform water budgets. These tools may help quantify the intensity of chronic effects of environmental changes and improve future productions.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I keep two of my favorite articles all the time in my backpack.
  1. McDowell, N.G., Fisher, R.A., Xu, C., Domec, J.C., Hölttä, T., Mackay, D.S., Sperry, J.S., Boutz, A., Dickman, L., Gehres, N. and Limousin, J.M., 2013. Evaluating theories of drought‐induced vegetation mortality using a multimodel–experiment framework. New Phytologist, 200(2), pp.304-321.
  2. Trugman, A.T., Anderegg, L.D., Shaw, J.D. and Anderegg, W.R., 2020. Trait velocities reveal that mortality has driven widespread coordinated shifts in forest hydraulic trait composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(15), pp.8532-8538.
McDowell et al. (2013) are the complete packages of effects of drought in plant functioning from measurements to global projections.  Trugman et al. (2020) gave fantastic ideas of trait velocity with time. Both articles help me understand overall ecohydrological responses from molecule to global scale.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love hiking, reading biography books, and spending time with my family. 
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