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MEET A LEAF: Sam ZIPPER

4/30/2018

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Dr. Sam Zipper is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria & McGill University
Website: https://samzipper.weebly.com/ | Twitter: @ZipperSam
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I think of ecohydrology as trying to understand relationships between ecosystems and the water cycle.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.A. in Geology from Pomona College, and a Ph.D. in Freshwater and Marine Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 
Freshwater and Marine Sciences is an interdisciplinary program for folks interested in water science, and was great fit for me as a budding ecohydrologist because I could take courses in departments all over campus – civil engineering, geosciences, agronomy, forest & wildlife ecology, zoology, and probably a few more I’m forgetting!
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
While we often hear about scientists following their childhood passion straight to a successful career via a series of logical steps, just as many of us – perhaps more – have winding, nonlinear paths.
 
As an undergraduate at Pomona College, I was an undeclared sophomore trying to decide between Spanish and Art when I took Eric Grosfils’ intro geology course to fulfill my science requirement – or so I thought. The field trips got me hooked, and before I knew it I was a major. While I loved heading up to the Sierras to check out plutons, I gravitated towards hydrogeology for my senior thesis because I had always enjoyed camping by water (rivers, lakes, streams, etc.) and wanted to work on something with clear relevance to society.

 
I spent the year after graduation working in the Coastal Systems Group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, collecting and analyzing sediment cores from all over the world to study hurricane histories. However, the major transformative event of my time in Woods Hole was when someone told me you could get paid to go to grad school. No one else in my family had done a graduate degree, so just finding out I wouldn’t have to go into debt to earn one was a big eye opener for me. Even though it seems like common knowledge now that I’ve spent the past 7 years in academia, I still try to mention that grad school is a paid position when I meet with undergraduates or high schoolers, just in case they are like a young Sam!
 
Following Woods Hole, I mostly rode my bike for the next year, spending a summer (and my savings) biking down the Pacific Coast before moving to New York with some friends, where I worked as a bicycle delivery person for a bakery (subsisting mostly on cookies that broke in transit), played drums (poorly) in a band, and tutored science at a high school in East Harlem while applying to graduate school. I applied to Wisconsin on some last-minute encouragement from an ex-girlfriend and my application bounced around several departments before ending up in the hands of Steve Loheide, who had just got an NSF Water Sustainability and Climate project funded and needed a grad student. This was the first time I heard about ecohydrology (or hydroecology, as Steve likes to call it) as a field, and it was a perfect fit for me – it combined my background in water science with my interests in modern processes that are highly relevant to society. Since then, it’s been all ecohydrology, all the time!
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Moving forward, it will be important for the ecohydrology community to integrate social dynamics into our research.
 
Socio-environmental research has emerged separately in ecology (e.g. social-ecological systems) and, more recently, hydrology (socio-hydrology), but I think ecohydrologists are especially well positioned to help understand human-environment interactions – after all, humans are the primary driver of both ecological and hydrological change around the globe. Dieter Gerten made this point nicely a few years ago, and I think the discipline is moving in that direction.

 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
I think the agricultural water management community has basically been doing “ecohydrology” by another name for about 100 years longer than us hydrologists, and I’ve always had a soft spot for old papers. Hooghoudt (1952) ‘Tile Drainage and Subirrigation’ has some great illustrations, fundamental insights into groundwater-ecosystem interactions, and laid the framework for some of my dissertation research over 60 years later!
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
In my past life, I liked to fix up old bikes and ride them around. Now I have a 3 month old daughter so I spend most of my free time wandering the streets of Victoria, pushing a stroller in a sleep-deprived haze.
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MEET A LEAF: ShirLEY (KURC) PAPUGA

4/27/2018

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PictureDr. Papuga at the Creosotebush Flux Tower Site in the Santa Rita Experimental Range, AZ

Dr. Shirley Papuga is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at Wayne State University - Detroit, MI.  She is also the current Chair of the AGU Ecohydrology Technical Committee.  @MIhappyfamily | hydro.wayne.edu
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​What does ecohydrology mean to you?

In the most general sense, ecohydrology to me involves the way in which plants influence hydrologic processes, and in turn, how hydrology influences plant dynamics.  In my view this could happen at multiple time (e.g. daily, annually) and space scale (e.g. stomata, catchments).

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree is in Mathematics from Kalamazoo College in Michigan.  My PhD is from University of Colorado in the Geological Sciences.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I started out my academic career, ecohydrology was really just gaining momentum as a new interdisciplinary science.   I was lucky enough to have encountered some big thinkers throughout my graduate career who pushed me to look at the world with a curious interdisciplinary perspective.

As an undergraduate, I wanted to use my mathematics education in environmental science applications, and worked on a Senior Individualized Project “Hillslope Runoff Through Grids of Patchy Vegetation: Predictions Using Modified Percolation Theory” at Los Alamos National Laboratory (in 1997!).   Through that project I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work closely with two of today’s most influential ecohydrologists – Dr. Dave Breshears (ecologist), now at University of Arizona and Dr. Brad Wilcox (hydrologist) now at University of Texas A&M.  Even then, Breshears and Wilcox were dabbling at bringing together ecologic and hydrologic perspectives!
Inspired by this, I decided to pursue a graduate education at University of Virginia (UVA), where under the mentorship of Dr. John Albertson I was exposed to eddy covariance and remote sensing techniques.  Through in-person visits, John introduced our UVA cohort (including Kelly Caylor, Todd Scanlon, and Chris Williams) to big interdisciplinary thinkers like Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe and William Kustas.    They helped me to see the importance of scale and how the land surface was connected to the atmosphere through the vegetation.

My time at UVA left me wanting a better hands-on understanding of what I had been modeling.  So, I ventured off to New Mexico Tech to work with Dr. Eric Small (now at University of Colorado) – where I began to work in the field at the Sevilleta desert grasslands and shrublands with Bowen ratio, eddy covariance, and sap flow systems - giving me a keen appreciation for the challenges of collecting data.  Eric also had a partnership with University of Arizona which gave me the opportunity to interact with more field-oriented interdisciplinary hydrologists like Paul Brooks and Russ Scott.   I also attended the AGU Chapman conference “Eco-hydrology of Semiarid Landscapes: Interactions and Processes” held in Taos, New Mexico.   That small formative conference gave me the opportunity to meet and brainstorm with more of our big interdisciplinary thinkers like Rob Jackson and Travis Huxman.  And it was from there that I was really committed to dryland ecohydrology.

The bottom line for me is that as a student I was encouraged to talk with people from different disciplines and different perspectives.  Those discussions shaped the way I think about problems.  Over time, ecohydrology became the intuitive way for me to think about the interconnected processes on the land surface and their feedbacks with the atmosphere.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think we are going to see the potential for ecohydrology in helping us in understand the dynamics of contaminant transport and pervasiveness in complex systems such as cities.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite ecohydrology paper is “Ecohydrology: A hydrologic perspective of climate‐soil‐vegetation dynamics” by Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe published in Water Resources Research in 2000.  This “vision paper” emphasizes the role of soil moisture in connecting the vegetation to the atmosphere and also to biogeochemical processes.  I also feel that it came at a time when I was one of those “young researchers” that was looking for the sort of encouragement that Dr. Rodriguez-Iturbe was bestowing.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have to admit, I have a super family that is a whole lot of fun.  They’re my boys – my husband, our two sons (5 and 2), and our dog.  We have fun doing everything together – from digging for worms in the yard, wearing noise-cancelling headphones at the Detroit Grand Prix, camping in the rain, riding the streetcar, growing giant carrots in our stock tank garden, watching Paw Patrol, and playing soccer.   Those boys make every moment amazing!

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ADDING OUR LEAVES

4/27/2018

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Inspired by the AGU Centennial Celebration (https://centennial.agu.org/) and how our interdisciplinary science has grown in the last 100 years, our TC is planning to add a "leaf" to the ecohydrology tree week-by-week by introducing you to some ecohydrologists and how their experiences helped shaped the perspective they contribute.
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