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MEET A LEAF: Shishir Basant

3/25/2019

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Shishir Basant is a PhD candidate working with Dr. Brad Wilcox in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Texas A&M University. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I still treat hydrology as a reference point to understand the importance of ecohydrology. And that’s what ecohydrology is to me – expanding our understanding of hydrology by taking into account the biophysical processes in a system. To me, personally, being an ecohydrologist (as opposed to a hydrologist) has allowed me to see the relevance of what we do beyond water resources to other implications such as carbon balance and system stability.     

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in mechanical engineering which I acquired from the National Institute of Technology Nagpur (India) in 2009. I moved to US (and Texas A&M University) in 2014 to pursue a masters in hydrology. I started working on my PhD with my adviser Brad Wilcox a year after that.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
In the year preceding to moving to Texas A&M as a graduate student, I was working as a fellow with a grass roots organization in Central Himalayas in India. During this time, I was involved with their project on aquifer mapping and catchment delineation while engaging the community in a participatory manner. This unique experience motivated me to pursue graduate school in the area of hydrology. However, my introduction to ecohydrology was through a course which gave me the opportunity to view vegetation as part of the hydrological systems. Specifically, I was excited by the work related to shrub encroachment and streamflow dynamics in Central Texas by Brad Wilcox in whose lab I have been working as a graduate student since 2015. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I have always been interested in the narrative of planting trees for carbon gain and climate change mitigation. The concerns related to tree plantation programs have been especially raised in works such as those by Dr. Rob Jackson, Dr. Esteban Jobaggy and Dr. Joseph Veldman. However, this idea that “tree planting and creating forests is good” has continued to persist in the society at large. I think that as a discipline ecohydrology is probably most well placed to correct such misconceptions. How can we break down the advancements we make as ecohydrologists to something which can take the place of some of these misconceptions and help correct some of these dominant narratives? Working closely with social and political scientists could give us some answers and could also be one of the emerging areas. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
In my PhD so far I have spent a lot of time characterizing soil moisture heterogeneity in a shrubland and in trying to understand how it may be linked with vegetation. In this regard, a favorite would be Breshears and Barnes (1999) where they introduce a four-compartment soil moisture model to illustrate the interdependency between plant functional types and soil moisture. Even though a very simple idea, the framework helped me think about heterogeneities at the grassland-forest continuum in semiarid systems. I was also very excited to see the paper by Stocker et al. (2018) last year which showed the role of soil moisture droughts in subduing light use efficiency. 
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Apart from sifting through my data and literature, I enjoy sketching, gardening, cooking and playing soccer. I also like to keep up with my interests in history and political ecology when I can.   
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MEET A LEAF: Mauricio E. Arias

3/18/2019

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Dr. Mauricio E. Arias is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
Website: watershedsustainability.org
Twitter: @WaSusResearch
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I like to think of Ecohydrology in a broad interdisciplinary sense: it is the field that seeks to understand the interactions and feedbacks between the hydrological cycle and ecological processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate and master’s degrees where in environmental engineering sciences from the University of Florida, and my PhD was in Civil and Natural Resources Engineering from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The first time I heard of ecohydrology was during my masters at UF, when myself and most of my colleagues at the Center for Wetlands were working with constructed wetlands, systems in which the good understanding of ecohydrological processes is a key factor in design and management. I then became interested (ok, obsessed) with how large-scale hydrology affects wetland vegetation. When I had the chance to develop my PhD dissertation in the Mekong River and visited the Tonle Sap wetland in Cambodia, I was certain that was going to be the core of my PhD journey.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
One important area that still needs much work is the integration of ecohydrology processes with hydrological modeling. Most hydrological models, in particular watershed-scale models commonly used by water resources researchers and practitioners, make faulty assumptions related to land cover dynamics (or lack thereof), surface-driven rainfall-runoff responses, and potential evapotranspiration. There has been much progress in describing these processes at the plot scale, but how to effectively propagate them to a scale that is meaningful to regional water and natural resources managers is something where I foresee much research being needed.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Foti, R., del Jesus, M., Rinaldo, A., Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., 2012. Hydroperiod regime controls the organization of plant species in wetlands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 19596–19600.
This paper described how inundation patterns driven by rainfall seasonality throughout the Everglades where responsible for the spatial distribution of wetland vegetation communities. I was especially fond of this paper because it was published right when I was in the middle of my PhD studying a wetland system of similar dimension, but for which I ended up using a different approach to deal with the limited data collected before my time in Cambodia.
  
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I do not get to spend as much time in the water at work as I would like, but I am fortunate to live by the beautiful Hillsborough River that meanders through Tampa. I love kayaking early in the morning or watching the sunset in the canoe with my son and wife.
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MEET A LEAF: DAVE BRESHEARS

3/11/2019

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​Dr. David D. Breshears ("Dave") is a Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, jointly affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Ecological Society of America.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JQOZ4cUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Twitter: @DaveBreshears   
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As almost everyone else in this series has noted, ecohydrology is about the intersection and interactions between ecology and hydrology.  However, being affiliated with a watershed management group at the time that we were preparing to launch the journal Ecohydrology, I was challenged to defend how this really differed from watershed management, which had for decades considered both ecology and hydrology.  I think there are three criteria that, if not distinct from watershed management, represent areas of focus that have historically not been considered in depth by it.  First, historic use of the water balance equation usually results in aggregation of evaporation from plant foliage, evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants, yet these together dominate the water budget and need to be disaggregated to better understand and manage ecosystems and watersheds. Developments in flux towers and stable isotopes over the past couple of decades have changed the game in addressing these areas.  Second, feedbacks are really critical, whether they relate to runoff redistribution, to vegetation cover modifying soil evaporation, or broad-scale vegetation change impacting local and distant climate.  These were previously challenging to evaluate, and to some degree remain so, but are readily modeled such that different aspects of the predictions can now be evaluated.  We emphasized these feedbacks when we defined the scope of the journal Ecohydrology.  And third, as highlighted by Rodríguez-Iturbe in his classic 2000 paper, soil moisture is a key integrator, which contrasts with the primary focus of watershed management on overland flow, streamflow and groundwater recharge.  The three criteria listed are critical ones to study if we are to effectively address the challenges associated with rapid change in climate and land use.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I first got interested in ecology looking at illustrated diagrams of food webs and energy flow in high school, so then went to New Mexico State University to get a B.S. in Agriculture through the Wildlife Science program, moving more from organisms to ecosystems as I progressed.  After a couple of summers of University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, I decided to go to graduate school at Colorado State University, where I could simultaneously study how to use radiotracers in the environment and work on applied problems related to contaminants, working with Ward Whicker—an international leader in radioecology. I worked on modeling how contaminants released during 1960s weapons testing were transported through agroecosystems for my M.S.  I wanted a more ecological focus for my PhD and Colorado State also had a broad Program in Ecological Studies that I completed. I had the opportunity to go back to Los Alamos, NM, where I grew up, to work at Los Alamos National Lab (then run by University of California) on water balance issues in a semiarid piñon-juniper woodland as a way to consider longer-term issues that might influence adjacent landfill covers that would likely go through succession to also become woodlands.  I learned a great lesson when committee member Bill Lauenroth challenged me in my oral exam to explain why shortgrass steppe around Fort Collins and semiarid woodland around Los Alamos both had the same precipitation but different vegetation—an exam question I fell flat on (short answer: precipitation event size distribution is related to soil moisture depth distribution, which is related to plant life form). I spent the next three months mostly reading and that really reframed my thinking about semiarid ecosystems.    

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology? 
So, while working on issues of water balance in these semiarid woodlands, and collaborating with Brad Wilcox on runoff redistribution (among other topics), Brad came running down to my office to talk about the 2000 Rodríguez-Iturbe paper in Water Resources Research that so many others in this series have mentioned.  He, Brent Newman and Osvaldo Sala then went on to co-organize the first Chapman Conference in ecohydrology, which I helped with.  I was still worried about becoming established as an ecologist so had some reservation about becoming too affiliated with something that ended in "hydrology", as I shared in this essay.  Nonetheless, it served as a great framework for thinking about how semiarid systems worked. During that time, I was fortunate to have Ecohydrology Leaves founder Shirley Papuga as an undergraduate research student to work with. Additionally, colleague Craig Allen of Bandelier National Monument shared his research insights and invited me to work with him on drought-related tree mortality, and I have been working on that ever since, recently highlighted here.  At first I did not really associate tree mortality with being an ecohydrological problem, but it in fact largely is.  And tree die-off is becoming so extensive—for example recent California tree mortality approaches 150 million trees—that I am now working with a team that includes Abby Swann of University of Washington, who leads the modeling, on "ecoclimate teleconnections", where we estimate how the effects of complete tree loss in one region affect climate and vegetation (including crops) in others.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The most fundamental challenge we have as a society is to make rapid reductions in emissions fast enough to try to hit the goals spelled out in the IPCC Special Report on 1.5oC.  Both ecohydrology and my particular focus on drought- and heat-related tree die-off are deeply intertwined with this issue.  Most countries include afforestation (adding trees) as a major part of their plan for addressing goals of the Paris Accord.  Ongoing widespread woody plant encroachment, as studied by Steve Archer, also contributes to terrestrial carbon gains.  But at the same time, extensive deforestation must be dramatically reduced.  And the most complicated aspects of the challenge are twofold.  First, we are counting on increased tree biomass to slow the warming, but while we are warming, the probability of wildfire and of tree die-off (directly from drought or in association with pests and pathogens) are both increasing rapidly. Tree sensitivity to heat waves may make this situation even worse. Second, our research on ecoclimate teleconnections is suggesting extensive tree loss in one region can alter the plant productivity elsewhere in the same country or in another one, in some cases increasing it and in some cases decreasing it. This has profound implications for us as we attempt globally coordinated carbon management.  Understanding ecohydrological processes and feedbacks are key to helping us address the greatest challenge of our time and one of humanity's greatest challenges ever.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain. 
This is such a hard question, because there are so many great ones out there. I think the single best example of ecohydrology is the small, often overlooked, 1996 book by Ludwig, Tongway and others, "Landscape Ecology, Function and Management: Principles from Australia's Rangelands", because it does it all: develops a conceptual framework that is explicit and clear in terms of ecohydrological feedbacks, and then goes on to support it, model it, and provide monitoring and management guidance.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)? 
I enjoy spending time with my family, including my adult sons and their girlfriends; listening to rock, jazz and some classical on vinyl records on a great stereo at home; going to concerts; watching University of Arizona basketball, visiting the rocky Oregon coast; reading novels and poetry; and traveling.
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MEET A lEAF: Zulia Mayari Sanchez Mejia

3/4/2019

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Dr. Zulia Mayari Sanchez Mejia is an Associate Professor in the Water Science and Environment Department at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora (ITSON) in Sonora, Mexico.
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​What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me ecohydrology means beyond love.  I’ve heard this as a joke in a class or maybe it was in a couple of different courses...when the teacher was trying to motivate us and getting started to talk about fluxes...he/she asked "what is the energy that moves the world?" and suddenly he/she would say "and it's not love".  I guess it’s stuck with me, since I now tell that joke just when I’m about to start talking about the movement of water and energy, and start with examples from a very systematic view of fluxes and reservoirs. So...for me, ecohydrology can be the flux of matter, water and energy from one box to another, where the boxes are the components of our ecosystem, and where we can study the fluxes with various approaches. But it’s also love for science, working together, and appreciation of diverse thinking.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I graduated from the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara as an Environmental Biotechnology Engineer. I received my masters degree in Natural Resources at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora and my doctoral degree from the University of Arizona in Ecohydrology and Watershed Management.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I didn’t really hear of ecohydrology until my master’s studies. The most attractive part of it was the field work. As an undergrad we did quite a lot of field work: collecting plants and fungus, observing fauna, and describing the ecosystem. But, it was not until my masters that I got to learn about all of the equipment one can have in an ecosystem to actually understand processes, and it all spread from there. We went on a trip to collect precipitation data from Mazatlan to Santiago Papasquiaro; from this I got a sense of spatial scale. By the time I got to the Papuga Lab for my PhD I had so many questions and ended up with even more!  I thought I was only going to work in the desert but found much more in courses and by helping my mates with their fieldwork.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am a little biased, but I think ecohydrology of coastal systems has many opportunity areas. Usually I think about soil moisture and vapor pressure deficit as main drivers of ecosystem processes, but suddenly when working in coastal systems soil moisture is not a limiting factor. In fact, the seagrasses that I’m working with are submerged in a matrix of water so the gas exchange is happening between the plant and the water column. Land surface-atmosphere models lack a good representation of coastal ecosystems. And coastal ecosystems are so important since they connect the continents with the oceans. So, I think the community will be paying more attention to these topics in the future.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It would be Charney (1975).  Finally after what felt probably like 100 times of reading it, I actually understood albedo.  I also understood connectivity between the land surface and the atmosphere. For me albedo is such a simple and beautiful concept.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
On the weekends Chris and usually make chilaquiles. I read latino-american literature. We watch movies, visit family, hike, or try a new restaurant.  We love to eat so, we cook a lot. 
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