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MEET A LEAF: Valeriy Ivanov

5/25/2020

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Dr. Valeriy Ivanov is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan.   Twitter: @hydrowit   Instagram:  valeriy_ivanov2208
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Together with colleagues (S. Fatichi and E. Daly), we recently wrote a review article for Oxford Bibliographies detailing our vision of the discipline (Ecohydrology. Online reference resource, Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199363445-0120). I will recite it here: ecohydrology is the science that studies how water in all its forms links living organisms and their abiotic environment to define their function, interactions, structure, and distribution. The key point, perhaps, is the multifaceted nature of ecohydrology that spreads its interests across various terrestrial ecosystems in which water plays the crucial linking role. My personal bias is the focus on vegetation water relations.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my undergraduate degree (a Diploma) in Hydrology at Moscow State University in Russia. I later moved to the U.S. and did both my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Hydrology at MIT working with Rafael Bras. 

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Educated as a physical hydrologist at my undergraduate institution, my graduate school period benefitted from the freedom of thought. I was fortunate to be working in the group that was frequented by a diverse cohort of scientists from around the world. There was a continuous flow of novel research insights - the ideas of ecohydrology were ‘brooding’. Personally, I was affected by the passionate seminars by Prof. I. Rodriguez-Iturbe and our subsequent group discussions of ecohydrology papers that started coming out in the early 2000s. The monograph on ecohydrology by Prof. P. Eagleson that exposed the elegant combination of physical and stochastic principles was yet another strong nudge.
 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Undoubtedly, the intersection of plant canopy, stem, and root ecophysiology and soil water hydraulics.  As vegetation traits are gradually filtered in response to the transient climate, there is a need to better understand belowground controls of plant ecophysiological function. The coupling between root traits and soil hydraulic relations emerges as one critically less studied domain where colleagues and I are investing research efforts with unexpected discoveries.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain
Noy-Meir, I. 1973. Desert ecosystems: Environment and producers. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4(1): 25–51. This review article on water-limited ecosystems was perhaps my first read that revealed the amazing plasticity of vegetation and its ability to thrive in environments of scare resource. Despite the qualitative nature of the narrative, this synthesis raised a lot of immediate questions that required a quantitative approach and some form of a model in which water was the crucial element. This created an obvious bridge between my past experiences of being a physical hydrologist and the new realm that no longer required to consider vegetation to be a ‘resistance function’.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to learn, invent, and fix things. My latest projects include a climbing cave for my kids in the house; a mega-swing on a 200-year old oak in the backyard. A tree-house that balances load on a maple tree and uses no nails on its stem or branches. A zip-line. My field experiences are always fun – through them, I learned arborist’s techniques to climb tall trees, how to sleep in a hammock, or choose a path in the jungle. I am looking forward to learn reindeer sledding next year! 
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MEET A LEAF: Sonia Seneviratne

5/18/2020

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​Dr. Sonia I. Seneviratne is a Full professor in Land-Climate Dynamics ETH Zurich.  Twitter: @SISeneviratne
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?

It is the interface between vegetation and water cycle processes on land. It is about how biological processes (photosynthesis, plant physiology, ecosystem dynamics) interact with physical processes affecting the water exchanges (energy and mass balance, thermodynamics, gravity). It is essential to consider the two-way interactions taking place: Lack of water affect plants, but plants have the dominant control on a main water flux on land, namely evaporation of water from the land surfaces. I am also fascinated about how these interactions are modified with human-induced climate change, i.e. about the effects of climate regime shifts and changes in CO2 concentrations on plant-water relations, and in turn on the role of plant-water relations in affecting the land carbon sink in a warmer climate.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I started with an undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Lausanne and completed my 3rd year which would be now equivalent to a BSc degree. I then switched to a MSc degree in Environmental Sciences, with a major in Atmospheric Physics at ETH Zurich. I did my PhD degree at ETH Zurich in Atmospheric and Climate Sciences.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I was always fascinated by both biology and physics and had a lot of trouble deciding which of the two to study when I started my university studies. When I realized the role that plants play in weather and climate dynamics, and how much uncertainties there remained in their understanding, I automatically realized that this was what I wanted to study. This was in my 3rd year of biology, I was then an exchange student at ETH Zurich and attended climate lectures out of curiosity. Another formative experience was a 6-month internship I did two years later studying medicinal plants in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. I was captivated by the “cloud forest”, a zone with persistent cloud cover, which is continuously fed by evaporation from the rainforest. This motivated me to do research on plant-water interactions.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The interface between the carbon and water cycles seems particularly exciting and important to me. Land is a sink for almost 30% of our CO2 emissions. It is unclear if this sink will be maintained under further increases in CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures, for instance because droughts could become more frequent in some regions. In a recent study (Humphrey et al. 2018, Nature), we have found that current climate models underestimate the observed interannual correlation between water availability on land and CO2 fluctuations on global scale. This suggests that our models may underestimate how strongly plants are affected by water deficits and how this affects in turn the global carbon cycle. We need more scientists investigating these interactions, ideally with different backgrounds: i.e. ecohydrologists, but also climate scientists, biogeochemists and ecophysiologists.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite paper in the area of ecohydrology is the landmark study by Randy Koster and Chris Milly in 1997. They were able to characterize the soil moisture dynamics of all land surface models at the time using two simple relationships: 1) the efficiency of the soil’s evaporation sink integrated over the active soil moisture range, and 2) the fraction of this range over which runoff is generated. I loved how this simple framework could capture much of the behavior of the models, no matter how complex they appeared to be. I was very fortunate to do my postdoctoral research with Randy Koster at NASA.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I spend time with my family. My husband and I have two kids, who are 6 and 10. We like to go on small bike tours, skiing in the mountains, watching movies, and travelling together. I also play go, a Chinese board game. Finally, I love to read books whenever I find time to.
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MEET A LEAF: David Reed

5/11/2020

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​Dr. David Reed is a Research Assistance Professor at the Center for Global Change & Earth Observations at Michigan State University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary field. It’s right in the name, as ecology is an applied biology field and hydrology is an applied physics field. To me, that means everyone is bringing their own perspectives and methods into the field and we each get to approach the same data from our own points of view. It’s exciting and makes the potentially repetitive nature of science fresh to me. I don’t feel like I have very many projects that are similar to each other, from forest disturbances in the Rockies to building sensors and new methods for winter limnology in Wisconsin. If you’re feeling bored as an ecohydrologist, that’s on you!

Also, as someone that loves working with undergraduate students, it’s also a field that, in my opinion, really resonates with students. If you’ve always been good at math and physics, but don’t want to work in a windowless basement, ecohydrology gets you applying math and physics out in the real world and wearing chacos. If you love writing computer code but can’t see yourself fitting in at Silicon Valley or Wall St, ecohydrology is a really solid career choice that will still give you all the interesting coding problems you could ever want. If you love gardening and chemistry both, combine the two together! If you’re feeling like you can’t find excited students to work with you, I think that’s also on you!

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I earned both my undergrad and master’s degrees the University of Michigan, in Climate Physics and Atmospheric Science respectively, from the Department of Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences (now Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering). After not knowing how to narrow down what I was interested in, Brent Ewers took me on as a PhD student at the University of Wyoming where I earned some hybrid PhD between the Department of Atmospheric Science and the Program in Ecology.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I’ve always been interested in how the land-surface interacts within the climate system, but wow, is that a broad area. Over the last decade now, I’ve been wandering through projects all related to that very broad area, but I think it really just comes down to me being outdoors a lot, both growing up as a child and also now as an adult. This is were we all live, play, work and grow and as a curious scientist, it’s easy to just go on a walk with my dog through my neighborhood and get sweep away with all the life happening around us all the time.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Data science, and interdisciplinary data science at that! I find most of the neat papers I’m reading and reviewing lately are leaning into data science questions. How can we connect spatial and temporal data in meaningful ways? With data files being gigabytes-to-terabytes sized, how can you distill a meaningful story out of all that and not just get lost in the details? How can ecohydrology data be used in other fields? Maybe most simple sounding, how can I make better figures that shows more data clearly? All those things are hard, but when you really get it right, it’s easy to see.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
While not a single paper, I’m going to say the Campbell and Norman (An Introduction to Environmental Biophysics) as well as the Monteith and Unsworth (Principles of Environmental Physics) textbooks. Both are written so clearly that you can hand a chapter to an undergraduate researcher and they can get up to speed on the field. Both are written so cleanly that when I need to get a refresher on this topic or that equation, I’m not spending 30 minutes finding the topic or equation and then forgetting what I was originally working on. Those two textbooks really make it easy to approach and then remain grounded in the field.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I do a fair amount of baking. I always enjoy making large and elaborate desserts, and then share >75% of the dessert with my lab group. That way I don’t have to eat a three-layer german chocolate cake or a ginger caramel apple cheesecake all by myself. I also have a pretty decent board game collection that I’ve been working on for over a decade now.
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MEET A LEAF: TYSON SWETNAM

5/4/2020

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Dr. Tyson L. Swetnam is a Research Assistant Professor in the BIO5 Institute at University of Arizona. Twitter: @tswetnam

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What does ecohydrology mean to you? 
I still think of that raindrop and its journey. Where does it go? What does it do after it and a trillion more drops like it land at the top of a watershed soak into the soil? The things that happen because of that raindrop changes our world in so many amazing and life sustaining ways that we don’t fully understand yet. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (BS), Watershed Management (MS, PhD)

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology? 
I am privileged to have had a scientist father who took me to amazing places as a child to watch his team do field work. I’ve been thinking about natural science since I was very young. In college I was a wildland firefighter, spending those thousands of hours outside watching some fairly extreme natural processes at work turned into an obsession of learning how landscapes evolve over time.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology? 
Data intensive science. The ability to take many different types of data (e.g., remote sensing from satellites to drones, in situ measurements from instruments, organism traits and genetics, etc.) and apply advanced techniques (e.g., non-parametric statistics, machine learning, edge computing) to tease out pattern and process from our data in new and exciting ways. New ecohydrologists need to polish up their computer programming skills in addition to their other studies. I know, it's a lot to learn. At the very least, learn to communicate your needs to informaticians and software engineers.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Not a paper, but the book “Terrestrial biosphere-atmosphere fluxes” (2013) by Russell Monson and Dennis Baldocchi. 

Russ came to Arizona during the last two years of my PhD and taught this material as a course. It was the last semester long class I ever took, it was also the most challenging and stimulating. The book is a tour de force that every ecohydrologist should attempt to read.  


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Family-time, camping, hiking around looking for shed antlers (deer and elk) and bowhunting in my home state of Arizona.
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