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MEET A LEAF: Becca Barnes

4/27/2020

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​Dr. Rebecca (Becca) Barnes is an Associate Professor at Colorado College in The Environmental Studies Program. You can follow her on Twitter @waterbarnes.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology is the study of how water and ecosystems interact, at multiple scales, from the microbe and leaf to continental scale watersheds. Over the last twenty years, what is and is not ecohydrology has changed substantially. In fact, five years ago my research would likely not be included within its scope. I appreciate that the field can evolve, incorporating more approaches, as scientists become more interdisciplinary, allowing us to collectively better characterize complex system dynamics underlying our many water resource challenges.  

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I got my undergraduate degree in Geology from Oberlin College. After a few years of community organizing, I attended Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), earning a MPA in Environmental Policy & Natural Resource Management and a MS in Water Resources. After SPEA, I went on to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies for my PhD.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
After college I was a community organizer in the northeastern US and for a year worked on urban water quality issues. Working on urban waterways provided me an exciting opportunity to talk about clean water and sense of place, to discuss equity and education, with community members who often didn’t talk to each other. In going to SPEA, I was able to explore multiple dimensions of water resources – lenses ranging from cost-benefit analysis and environmental engineering to stream ecology and ecotoxicology. It was aquatic chemistry with Jeff White that really connected all the dots for me – realizing that by understanding the way elements move through ecosystems I could help address and hopefully answer environmental management problems. To me, the field of biogeochemistry presented this perfect Venn diagram of geology, water, and society; allowing me to answer questions that people cared about.

Ultimately, I am interested in how human induced disturbance – from the chronic pushes on ecosystems (e.g. warming temperatures) to acute events (e.g. fires) – alters the way carbon and nitrogen cycle through watersheds. In order to answer any of these questions we need to understand how the water is moving through the ecosystem and how disturbance changes the partitioning of water in that system. As my research program has evolved, I have thought more explicitly about the shifts in flow paths accompanying disturbance and how these changes ultimately alter the connectivity of the terrestrial and aquatic landscape.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am really interested in all the work going on linking hydrologic variability (on scales of minutes to months) with ecosystem processing and not surprisingly biogeochemistry. Whether said variability is driven by diurnal fluctuations in evapotranspiration, tides, dam operations, or the decadal plus variability of climate and vegetation, we can apply lessons learned from seemingly disparate systems, more easily if we use an interdisciplinary framework like ecohydrology. These lessons should help us better understand not only how ecosystems function but also how to better address growing water resource challenges.

The rollback of WOTUS in the past year sparked significant advocacy by hydrologists and I am excited about the engagement of our field in the public sphere; especially given how science is under attack. This engagement is especially important given the centrality of clean, available water in equity issues globally and I am cautiously optimistic that we are becoming more comfortable in our role as advocates.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Recently I’ve been really excited about the papers coming out of the Dry Rivers RCN group because their synthesis and opinion pieces collectively connect how our science can and should inform policy and management. Two such papers include (1) Zero or not? Causes and consequences of zero-flow stream gauge readings (Zimmer et al. 2020) discussing various scenarios that can lead to no flow conditions and the importance of thinking about context and (2) An Eos piece (Shanafield et al. 2020) on the need for community engagement in river management, especially important given the increased risk of drought and ecological degradation. In addition, the nature of the RCN really highlights what we can learn when examining mechanism across broad spatial scales, something that is invariably more successful via collaborative interdisciplinary groups.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I am lucky enough to live in a place where I can hike, year-round, for miles from my doorstep. I am grateful for this geography and take advantage of it as much as possible. In addition, I enjoy other very “on brand” watery activities like snowshoeing, kayaking, and canoeing. When not soaking in the 300 days of sunshine offered by Colorado, I enjoy crafting, gardening, and cooking with my two kitties and new pandemic puppy (and hopefully friends again in the not too distant future!).
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MEET A LEAF: Lejo Flores

4/20/2020

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Dr. Alejandro (Lejo) Flores is an Associate Professor at Boise State University in the Department of Geosciences.  He directs the Lab for Ecohydrologic Applications and Forecasting (LEAF!) at Boise State.  Follow him on Twitter @HydroLejo.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I marvel at the way that terrestrial vegetation couples the global water, energy, and carbon cycles. Right now, amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, I’m preparing a few short video lectures for my sophomore-level students in Water in the West aimed at illustrating how evapotranspiration connects these three global cycles and underscoring how fascinating that is. Here’s the link to the playlist, for those interested. To me, the first time I saw that in Fatih Eltahir’s hydrology class my mind was blown. It’s something really profound and underscores the centrality of ecohydrology in a changing climate.

I’m also fascinated by the ways and mechanisms through which humans influence those cycles through water and land management activities. A lot of my contemporary work involves modeling human activities in the landscape as dynamically coupled to natural systems and other humans. We seek to use modeling techniques like agent based models to allow human actors to directly influence the land by, for example, cutting down trees or diverting water and then to capture the ramifications of those actions in ways that can be “felt” by those human actors at a later time.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I got a BS in Civil Engineering from Colorado State, and then stayed for an MS in River Hydraulics from CSU. I did my PhD in Hydrology at MIT with Rafael Bras. In that time as a graduate student I was very fortunate to be exposed to amazing classes that included aquatic ecology, all kinds of fluids and hydrology classes, plant physiology, geomorphology, and also data assimilation and modeling.​
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How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As an MS student with Brian Bledsoe I became fascinated with the classical papers of Hack (1957) and Hack and Goodlett (1960) on the influence of vegetation on landforms. At the time, my work focused on trying to investigate watershed-scale indicators of topography, vegetation, land use history, and soils/lithology that might provide insight to reach-scale ecosystem form. It was work oriented towards providing a template for providing geomorphic and ecological context for stream habitat assessments. 

When I was at MIT I was amidst colleagues like Valeriy Ivanov and Daniel Collins were really trying to push the envelope in modeling some key complexities like the influence of hillslope asymmetry on vegetation and water, energy, and nutrient cycles. That was really when I developed an appreciation for models as not simply tools to predict outcomes, but as tools to explore the ramifications of our state of knowledge – to be able to use models to actually reveal things about how the world works that we should be able to observe in nature.  

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think better integrating and representing in models the ways that humans influence ecohydrologic systems and the way that those systems respond and ultimately influence human behavior. I see this as critical for ultimately allowing us to manage ecosystems in a changing world, as well as a mechanism to allow us to provide better information to land and water managers. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Again, Hack (1957) and Hack and Goodlett (1960) were really so influential for me. I read them as an MS student in the way that some people read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. As a PhD student the sequence of three papers Plants in water-controlled ecosystems: active role in hydrologic processes and response to water stress by Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Amilcare Porporato, Francesco Laio, and Luca Ridolfi were sort of the epicenter of discussion amidst many of my cohort at the time. More contemporarily, I’m a big fan of my friend Abby Swann’s work. She just has such elegantly designed numerical experiments. 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
​Living in Boise and being an Earth scientist, I love the outdoors. The foothills are minutes away on my bike and Idaho’s wilderness only a couple hours away by car. I enjoy introducing my wife and my two little humans to nature and the Earth.
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MEET A LEAF: Susana Alvarado-Barrientos

4/13/2020

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Dr. Susana Alvarado-Barrientos is an Associate Professor at the Instituto de Ecología A.C., which is a Mexican public research institute.
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I´m hanging to clean the radiometer of a flux tower I set up at a mangrove in Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico.
What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me, is the integration of ecology and hydrology. It is an effort to holistically study and understand the magic of the planet, which is contained in water (as Loren Eiseley wrote and I totally agree). I like to tell my students to think about ecohydrology as the study of the incredible journey of water molecules around and around the planet, through the atmosphere, as part of clouds and raindrops, through the soils, rocks, rivers, plants, oceans, etc., etc. …and how the journey of all the water molecules modify the paths that they take. As one of my hydrology professors told us, we need imagination to pursue the study of water… I´d like to add that we need double the imagination to pursue the study of both ecology and hydrology together. Personally, it also means a journey: from my home country Guatemala, to Amsterdam, Manaus, Mexico, Iowa, New Hampshire and, so far, back to Mexico.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree is in Forest Engineering from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. I have a MSc degree in Hydrology with a specialization in Ecohydrology from the VU Universiteit Amsterdam. And, I have a PhD in Environmental and Earth Sciences from the University of New Hampshire (but I did two years of the Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology PhD program in Iowa State University before my adviser – Heidi Asbjornsen- moved to UNH).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
After I graduated, I worked at the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, on a project setting a water fund to involve different water users and stakeholders in upstream cloud forest conservation. Reading as much as I could about the forest-water links for this work, it became obvious that not a lot was known about the hydrology of tropical montane ecosystems. I don’t remember exactly how, but I came across the research that L.A. (Sampurno) Bruijnzeel´s group and collaborators were conducting in a Costa Rican cloud forest. It took a couple of emails to get me completely hooked on the idea of pursuing a MSc degree in Ecohydrology. I was fortunate to be part of one of the best hydrology graduate programs, having such great professors who not only taught theory in the classroom, but also application and techniques in the field. The faculty had super interesting projects in many places, so I was fortunate to go to Manaus for my master´s thesis field work (supervised by Sampurno Bruijnzeel and Maarten Waterloo). I helped out a doctorate student (Fabricio Zanchi) who´s project was hosted at LBA, so I was able to climb flux towers in the rain forest and wonder about the magnitude of the forest´s water flux towards the atmosphere. My thesis was on evapotranspiration estimates of an Amazonian heath forest (Campina)… which is out of this world by the way…how do these trees manage to live out of white sand?!

After that adventure I was invited to join a multidisciplinary team in Mexico to study cloud forest ecohydrology, as a doctorate student under the direction of Heidi Asbjornsen. I was joining a dream team, and back then I was not fully aware of this. Other PIs were Todd Dawson, Jeff McDonnell, and Sampurno Bruijnzeel. Friso Holwerda and Lyssette Muñoz-Villers were postdocs, and Greg Goldsmith was the other doctorate student. Many others were also involved, and I feel completely humble and honored, as I think back, to have been part of many discussions and to learn from these brilliant scientists. The two-water worlds hypothesis was in the making, for example. This project was the beginning of a long friendship and work collaboration among us. After I finished grad school, I came back to Mexico for a postdoc with Friso Holwerda, who was already at UNAM. Thanks to all these opportunities, I was able to set roots here. Now I am living the dream in Xalapa (lower montane cloud forest and coffee plantations altitude): working towards developing my research interests, collaborating on diverse projects, and teaching ecohydrology at the graduate level.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The hydrological functioning of ecosystems has been always a big area of ecohydrology, so emerging from that, I think questions about water redistribution and complementary/competitive water use of coexisting plants are still interesting and much is still unknown. I just recently came across, and started to be involved with, questions about the distribution of water among plants that create inter- and intraspecific root networks, such as mangrove species. These interactions are quite interesting and long-standing questions of ecology arise, such as mutualism in the face of very hostile environments. All the research stemming from the two-water world hypothesis is still a fruitful area of ecohydrology. Particularly interesting, but also very important for sustainable land management, are questions about complementary water (and nutrients) use of coexisting plants in biodiverse agroecosystems. The more is known on how different crops interact with other plants to the extent of sharing limited below-ground resources, the more we can contribute to agroforestry planning and increasing biodiversity in agroecosystems while maintaining productivity of food and other goods.

Another important area of ecohydrology has always been the land use change effects on hydrology and climate, which requires thinking not only on biophysical systems but on socio-ecosystems. Particularly and currently interesting to me, are the developments on how disruptions to hydrological connectivity in coastal ecosystems have impaired their functions leading even to mortality (like for mangroves), and how restoration of hydrological connectivity can be effective to restore vegetation in massively degraded zones. Also, as more and more measurements of land surface-atmosphere interactions are done and synthesized from tropical and coastal ecosystems (which are still under-represented in global measurements), fascinating things will be learned to fill gaps needed to validate models related to carbon allocation, carbon and water fluxes and the role of vegetation on modulating the climate at different scales.

After teaching ecohydrology to graduate students with different areas of specialization in ecology (some unrelated to ecohydrology), students mentioned, to my surprise, that the most interesting thing they learned was that vegetation was not only shaped by the environment, but that in fact, vegetation was very much involved in shaping the environment. So, I think that we have a lot more work to do in the realm of science outreach, not only to the general public, but also among other disciplines.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
This is a hard one. I have always admired how my professors write, so I am a bit biased to have their work as some of my favorites. I have a couple of favorite books, and on top of the list is “Forests, water and people in the Humid Tropics” edited by Mike Bonell and L.A. (Sampurno) Bruijnzeel. They did such a great and complete work. It is a compendium of a lot of aspects of the hydrological functioning of tropical forests and the hydrological impacts of land use change. The book is not only technical aspects but also reviews complex societal/political issues in the tropics. There has been a lot of advancement on the knowledge of ecohydrology of tropical forests since the book was out, but it is still largely relevant.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have a four-year old, so everyday I get to play with whatever is exciting to him (mostly involving superheroes, rescue team, riding a bike downhill), reading to him, and trying to come up with answers to some really intriguing questions on how everything works or what does something mean. I also enjoy trekking around nearby towns and parks with my family. 
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MEET A LEAF: Caitlin Eger

4/6/2020

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Caitlin Eger is a doctoral student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Syracuse University.  You can find her on Twitter: @Ecologentsia.
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Sunset at Daffodil Beach, Historic St. Mary's City on St. Mary's River, near the mouth of the Potomac on the Chesapeake Bay.
What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I think of ecohydrology as the physical or hydrologic features, conditions and processes that causally influence local ecological structure. This definition is complemented by a somewhat less-used term, hydroecology, which describes the reverse effect—that is, when ecological features are the cause of a locally specific hydrologic regime. A good example of an ecohydrologic feature is a seasonally high water table in a location where the temperature and terrain create the right conditions for forested ephemeral pools to exist in early spring, thereby creating breeding habitat for salamanders. Conversely, a hydroecological feature might be a cloud forest in which transpiration from the forest (but not precipitation) is driving humid, foggy conditions.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I completed a B.S. in Environmental Science and Chemistry at Juniata College, a small liberal arts school in central Pennsylvania. The college’s domestic field courses, study abroad program, and field station on Raystown Lake offered formative field experiences in my environmental science education. At the time, the Juniata chemistry department taught an organic-first curriculum for all STEM majors – Dave Reingold and Richard Hark made the material so interesting that I added chemistry to my environmental science major.

Later I completed a master’s in the Food, Agricultural Biological and Ecological Engineering department at Ohio State University. At OSU I completed coursework with three excellent ecological engineers, Jay Martin, Andrew Ward and Bill Mitsch. Andy Ward’s Environmental Hydrology textbook is one I have used regularly since undergrad and still reference. My master’s thesis looked at nutrient retention in suburban rain gardens, which had been retrofitted into a local neighborhood.
I am now completing my dissertation at Syracuse University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, advised by a biogeochemist, Charles Driscoll, and a hydrologist, David Chandler. My dissertation work examines how engineering design affects green infrastructure performance in the urban environment.


How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Like 350,000 other Colorado public school children, I attended Outdoor Lab for a week to learn about environmental science in the Rocky Mountains as a sixth grader. Seven years later, I took a gap year between high school and college and returned to Outdoor Lab as an intern. One of my intern responsibilities included teaching a three-hour trail course that introduced 6th graders to very basic ecology and hydrology principles. The course included hiking to north and south-facing sites in the same valley and having the students take field observations of relative humidity and temperature using a sling psychrometer. Teaching this course repeatedly throughout the water year provided a chance for me to observe firsthand how physical conditions, such as aspect, moisture and temperature could affect soil formation, freezing, snow cover, species density and biodiversity.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am dedicated to the idea that ecological engineering is an important emerging area of ecohydrology, since it relies upon the transfer of ecohydrologic discovery into applied engineering problems. The ecohydrologic processes we observe in natural systems are fascinating, but the field of traditional civil engineering is long overdue for an upgrade that includes understanding of how structures influence hydrology and ecology in the built environment.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
I’d like to suggest a favorite book – Soil Physics with Python: Transport in the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere System by Marco Bitelli, Gaylon Campbell and Fausto Tomei. I have been slowly working through the exercises in this book and found it a great way to learn Python. I was so excited to see the second edition published this year that I requested it as a birthday gift.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
To reduce stress in the coronavirus era, I’ve been savoring time with my family, sprouting seeds for my garden, making pavlova, and playing Zoom trivia with my colleagues every Thursday.
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