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Meet A Leaf: Todd Scanlon

3/28/2022

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Todd Scanlon is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
My understanding of the term “ecohydrology” has evolved over time. Earlier in my career I mostly associated this term with water-vegetation relationships in water-limited ecosystems, but it has broadened to encompass any research that involves linkages between hydrology and ecological or biogeochemical processes. In truth, this results in quite a bit of overlap between hydrology and ecohydrology because with only certain exceptions can hydrology be studied in isolation from ecological processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Earth Sciences from Dartmouth College, and my M.S. and Ph.D. were in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I first began my Ph.D. work, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Southern African Regional Science Initiative (SAFARI 2000) project. It was a great opportunity to work alongside world-class scientists in a field setting (the Kalahari region of southern Africa), an environment in which the linkages between water availability and vegetation processes are very evident.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
There’s a lot of potential for research viewing ecohydrology as an optimization problem. For example, this includes strategies for maximizing carbon gain while minimizing water loss at both the individual and ecosystem levels, how this is expressed at the watershed scale, and how this changes over time with rising CO2 levels, increased temperatures, and altered precipitation patterns.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’ll stick with a classic, by my post-doc advisor Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe: “Ecohydrology: A hydrologic perspective of climate-soil-vegetation dynamics” (Water Resources Research 36(1), 3-9, 2000). At least to me, this paper really defined the subdiscipline and laid out a very in influential vision for future research.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy playing basketball at lunchtime, when I can get to the gym. I have four kids who are involved in a lot of activities, so I do a lot of driving around and watching soccer gam
es. 
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Meet a leaf: Ana María Restrepo Acevedo

3/21/2022

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Ana María Restrepo Acevedo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin
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What does ecohydrology mean to you? Ecohydrology is the instrument to understand the different interactions between the ecosystems, soil, climate, living organisms, and water resources, facilitating the opportunity to predict how these interactions will be shaped in the future based on multilevel measurements and modeling efforts. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? I have a bachelor degree in Environmental Engineering, from LaSallista, a small private university in Medellín, Colombia. Currently, I’m a PhD candidate at the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT Austin. For my dissertation project I’m trying to understand how different types of ecosystem stresses affect transpiration and water availability for plants.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology? I encountered ecohydrology for the first time in 2015 as an undergraduate student. I had the amazing opportunity to travel to the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) for a non-paid internship during that summer where I learned from numerous exceptional scientists in the field. It was very surprising for me to see what they were doing: Combining engineering skills to build and implement different sensors to measure water movement inside vegetation and scale these measurements to ecosystem levels. Before my internship, I never heard about this potential before, and the idea of applying my engineering expertise in a non-traditional area captive my full interest. After that summer, I decided that I wanted to pursue my graduate studies in this field.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology? I believe that the coupling of natural and anthropogenic processes is key for the future in our field. Efforts in urban ecohydrology, costal zones interactions, ecosystems transformation, extreme weather events, and other anthropogenic and natural stressors are important to determine the health and productivity of our ecosystems. Moreover, this knowledge could be used for decision-making regarding all the new challenges as we are facing more of the consequences of climate change.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain. It is very hard to pick just one paper when we have a lot of great work in the field; however, there is a paper from He and Silliman (2019) title ‘Climate Change, Human Impacts, and Coastal Ecosystems in the Anthropocene’ that I found very interesting and impactful for the future of our field. The authors addressed the possible interactions between climate change and local human impacts, exemplifying how these interactions might affect major coastal ecosystems. They also addressed conservation strategies that can buffer the climate change effects and identified all the possible climate change stressors for the ecosystems. 
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)? I am a very social person and I very much enjoy spending time with fiends. Cooking and hosting game nights for my friends is one of my favorite things to do during the weekends. I love having people over and whenever I had the opportunity, I enjoy cooking and sharing different Colombian dishes such empanadas, arepas, and fried plantain. I have also started making my own sourdough bread – as almost everyone else during the pandemic! Cooking for my loved ones is my way to show all the appreciation I have for them. 
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Meet a Leaf...XING Li

3/14/2022

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​Xing Li is a postdoc researcher in Research Institute of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea.
Twitter: @XingLi83440245
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary field that explores how ecosystems interact with water. My previous research mainly focused on the carbon cycle, and further understanding of ecohydrology will help me mechanistically explain the behavior of ecosystem carbon-water coupling.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
B.S. in Geographic Information System, School of Geosciences, Chengdu University of Technology, China; Ph.D. in Remote Sensing with a thesis entitled ‘Exploring the response of terrestrial ecosystems to drought based on multi-source remote sensing data’, School of Resources and Environment, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I worked on remote sensing during my master's and first-year doctoral study. At that time, I didn't know much about some terminology, such as carbon cycle, water cycle, and ecology. When I started working on satellite solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) to explore how photosynthesis responded to drought, I found that my knowledge was insufficient to explain some of the vegetation behaviors observed by remote sensing. After several years of paper reading and research, now I have a better understanding of the interaction between ecosystems and climate change. But to present an interesting, solid science story, I still have to work harder to understand more about their interactions among ecosystems, carbon cycle, water cycle and so on. Ecohydrology is an indispensable field for me to study.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
At the leaf and canopy scales, the interactions between ecosystems and the environment are relatively well understood. Large-scale investigations using remote sensing still have many uncertainties. Currently, some emerging satellite observations have the potential for studying how plant functioning and ecosystem processes vary over the course of the diurnal cycle. This is a cutting-edge research topic.  Diagnosing the diurnal variations of ecosystem processes (such as photosynthesis) can provide insights into direct interactions between ecosystem processes and controlling factors, which otherwise would be obscured by aggregating the instantaneous variables to daily or seasonal scales.
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Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One paper from Dr. Benjamin D. Stocker (doi: 10.1111/nph.15123) attracted my attention strongly. They quantified the impacts of soil moisture on light use efficiency across biomes by separating the effect from VPD and greenness changes. Their study reveals substantial impacts of soil moisture alone that reduce GPP by up to 40% at sites located in sub-humid, semi-arid or arid regions. Their findings underline the importance of accounting for soil moisture effects on terrestrial primary productivity in addition to VPD. In subsequent studies, several researchers have disentangled the relative effects of VPD and soil moisture  on vegetation productivity.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
My life is very simple. Especially since the epidemic, I have spent most of time in the office and dormitory. The only fun for me is cooking. I'm good at cooking traditional Sichuan food (numbing and spicy).
 
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Meet A Leaf: Frances O'Donnell

3/7/2022

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Frances O’Donnell is an Assistant Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering at Auburn University. 
Twitter: @fcodonnell

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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I see ecohydrology as a systems approach to hydrology that considers two-way interactions between water and the physical, biological, and human environment. While this traditionally meant the interaction between water and vegetation, I see the influence of ecohydrology in a lot of creative approaches to researching complex systems involving water and people, animals, biogeochemical cycles, soils, governance systems, infrastructure, and more.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
My undergraduate degree is in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and my graduate degrees are in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a focus in water resources, so I am very much an ecohydrologist by training.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I had two wonderful research experiences as an undergraduate, one working in a plant physiology lab studying water transport in trees and the other writing a senior thesis about the carbon dynamics of forest ecosystems. I applied to graduate programs to continue my work in forest biogeochemistry, but had my application picked up by a new faculty member looking for students to study ecohydrology. I got to do my graduate research on coupled carbon-water dynamics in savannas, connecting my interest in carbon with my roots (literally!) in plant physiology and water.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on right now around what I’ll call periodically aquatic environments, for lack of a better term. These are systems like geographically isolated wetlands (which I study) and ephemeral streams that are inundated seasonally or under certain climate conditions. They provide important ecosystem services but are very sensitive to changes in climate and land cover. I’m always interested in topics that force us to question how we subdivide our discipline, and this area of research challenges the traditional division in research between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really like the old “Wet/Dry Daisyworld” paper. One recurring challenge I’ve dealt with over the years as a researcher is determining how the spatial scale of my analysis of a heterogeneous environment affects my results. This paper gives an elegant mathematical description of the problem that made it “click” for me when I read it in grad school.
Baldocchi, D.D., Krebs, T. and Leclerc, M.Y., 2005. “Wet/dry Daisyworld”: a conceptual tool for quantifying the spatial scaling of heterogeneous landscapes and its impact on the subgrid variability of energy fluxes. Tellus B: Chemical and Physical Meteorology, 57(3), pp.175-188.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to cook and have enjoyed learning to make the specialty dishes of the many places I’ve lived as an academic. Currently working on my southern bbq skills!
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