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 games. 

​Xing Li is a postdoc researcher in Research Institute of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea.
Twitter: @XingLi83440245

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).