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MEET A LEAF: Khandker Ishtiaq

6/25/2018

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Khandker Ishtiaq is currently working as a post-doctoral research associate in the Ecological and Water Resources Engineering Lab at West Virginia University, Morgantown. | Twitter: @ksishtiaq 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology is an emerging discipline that studies the complex interactions between hydrological and biological processes. More specifically, how the biotic components of natural environment response to the water and energy cycles is a crucial aspect of ecohydrology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a BSc and an MSc in Water Resources Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). I did my PhD in Water Resources and Ecological Engineering from Florida International University, Miami, where I worked on the development of scaling models of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems, including wetlands.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The first sense of ecohydrology came to me when I was working on a project focusing on the flow regulation rules of a hydraulic structure. One of the regulation targets was to ensure a minimum environmental flow through hydraulic structure during dry periods for sustainability of the aquatic ecosystem. Later on, as a part of my doctoral dissertation, I had the opportunity to study the environmental linkages and emergent scaling of ecosystem water and carbon fluxes across spatial and temporal scales. I was intrigued to learn about the ecosystem water-carbon nexus from the context of ecological processes. These works made me fascinated to continue my endeavor in the domain of ecohydrology and ecological engineering.    

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Ecohydrology is exceptionally multidisciplinary, and there are many new directions to peruse. Over the years through perseverance and hard work, we have made remarkable progress in this domain. However,  whether our current process understanding and underlying ecohydrological scaling relationships would hold in the + 1-2 °C temperature and + 10-20 % sea level world is a critical question that we need to know to maintain a habitable ecosystem.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
There are many! However, ‘Ecohydrology of water-limited environments: A scientific vision’ by Newman et al. (2006) (https://doi.org/10.1029/2005WR004141) is one of my favorites. This is an opinion paper published in Water Resources Research. The paper highlighted the need for a better understanding of the fundamental linkages among hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes, and urged for interdisciplinary visions to develop new methodologies for improved predictions of ecohydrological processes under the changing environment.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have a 2-month old who is occupying me nowadays! Besides, I like to play chess and study classical chess games. I enjoy spending time with animals. 
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MEET A LEAF: FRANCINA DOMINGUEZ

6/18/2018

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Francina Dominguez is a Hydroclimatologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As a hydroclimatologist, I see ecohydrology through the lens of land-atmosphere interactions. My focus is on understanding how ecosystems mediate the transfer of water/energy/momentum from the surface and subsurface to the overlying atmosphere. I mainly see these interactions at the very large scales (regional to continental).

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Civil and Environmental Engineering. I did a Postdoc in Hydrology and have been faculty in Atmospheric Sciences since 2009.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My PhD thesis focused on precipitation recycling, or the contribution of evapotranspiration within a region to its own precipitation. Ecosystems play a critical role in this, because through transpiration plants affect the time and spatial scale of precipitation recycling. I have been thinking of the role of ecosystems on the overlying atmosphere ever since. Now I have broadened my focus, and in addition to precipitation recycling I try to understand how ecosystem variability affects the overlying atmosphere by changing the thermodynamics and dynamics of the atmospheric system - from the local to the global scale.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The impacts of land-use and land-cover change on the hydroclimate of a region (from the subsurface to the atmosphere). I know this is really not a new area, but I don’t think we have really answered this question.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My new favorite paper is: “Hydrologic regulation of plant rooting depth” in PNAS by Fan et al. 2017. This paper lays out a new paradigm for plant rooting depth based on soil moisture availability from both precipitation and groundwater. It provides a global map of plant rooting depth, based on both observations and numerical modeling. I am a big fan of the work of this group!

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I dance! I used to be a contemporary dancer. Now, I don’t belong to a dance group, but I dance with my two girls all the time. 
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MEET A LEAF: ElizABETH BOYER

6/11/2018

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Elizabeth Boyer is an Associate Professor of Water Resources in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Penn State University.  Twitter: @bethboyerPSU
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology encompasses ideas and processes at the interface between hydrology and ecosystem ecology, and effects of biotic processes on the water cycle.
 
What are your degrees in?
I have a B.S. degree in Geography from Penn State University focused on remote sensing and geographic information systems; and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia focused on hydrology.  I completed a post-doc in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University focused on biogeochemistry. 
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to work as a trainee via an internship at Battelle / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  I was interested in pursuing a career in remote sensing at the time, but some great mentors there sparked my interest in surface and ground water.  That internship got me excited about quantifying processes in nature and concepts like fractal scaling, and led directly to my graduate and postdoctoral work in hydrology.  My research has since focused on understanding and predicting water quality, where you need to represent coupled hydrological, ecological, and geochemical processes in order to get it right.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m interested in how changes to eco-hydrologic systems – stemming from multiple stressors such as land use change, climate change, invasive species, and atmospheric deposition – will impact water quality and water scarcity.  Many parts of the world already lack clean water, many landscapes are being degraded, and many surface and ground waters are being polluted.  Water scarcity will be an even greater problem in the coming years as demand for water increases with population and economic growth.  Concepts and tools from ecohydrology can help achieve sustainable management of water, and to help solve global water problems.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Maciej Zalewski’s papers and reports have provided many ideas for my work, like his 2002 paper in Hydrological Sciences Journal on “Ecohydrology: the use of ecological and hydrological processes for sustainable management of water resources.”  Zalewski was ahead of the times in promoting the role of ecosystem services in integrated watershed management.  He articulates using ecosystem properties as a management tool to amplify opportunities and to eliminate threats – such as reducing point and non-point pollutants and mitigating catastrophic floods and droughts. I recommend that everyone read his stuff!
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love spending time with my family and friends exploring nature, especially in the forests, gorges, and lakes around Ithaca, NY.  In an earlier phase of life I was into photography, and I still like capturing light, color, and adventures through pictures.
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MEET A LEAF: Jeremy Littell

6/4/2018

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.Jeremy Littell is a Research Ecologist / Lead Scientist  (Climate Impacts) with the US Geological Survey and Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I’m interested in the ways climate change and climate variability affect landscapes, mainly through fire and vegetation change. These require multi-scale understanding of global-to-local gradients of water and energy to which plants and fuels response, and ecohydrology is the best framework for doing that because it can clearly and simultaneously account for both the ecological responses to hydrological variations and the hydrological responses to ecological variation.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in terrestrial ecology and graduate degrees in land resources and environmental science and something presumptuously titled “forest ecosystem analysis”.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I got my start trying to figure out how an uncommonly diverse assemblage of desert rodents responded to episodic pulses of water (El Niño years) and drought (La Niña Years), but it didn’t occur to me then that was anything other than pure Hutchinsonian ecology. Being a liability-minded kind of guy and generally watching out for me, my undergraduate adviser suggested I give up on rodents and look at trees, because you don’t catch hanta virus from trees. I had the good fortune to land a master’s project doing tree-ring based fire history in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where subalpine forests give way to lower elevation Douglas-fir woodlands. In that system, to understand why fires manifest as relatively rare crown fires in subalpine forest and more frequent fires in the lower elevation forests, it helps greatly to think about the energy and water balances that drive the vegetation and fuels there. The role of drought is a richer scientific endeavor if we think of drought not as an index relative to a mean, but instead a continuous process. It scales more easily that way. And that leads to thinking of fire as an ecohydrological process. Another observation that queued up ecohydrology, though I didn’t know the word at the time, was that the Douglas-fir in that system put on early wood (the light part of a tree ring) in spring and early summer, and then unlike their well-watered cousins in the western Cascades, they transition fairly abruptly to late wood (the dark part of a tree ring) and then quickly go dormant. The key to understanding the regional difference in ring formation is the seasonal timing of snowmelt and subsequent potential evapotranspiration (PET) that exceeds the water available for actual evapotranspiration (AET). I found out about this in the ecological literature, but quickly discovered that hydrologists (or at least some hydrologists) were used to thinking about those differences from the perspective of “Where’d the water go?, not “Why do the plants do what they do?”.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Because it provides a quantitative and predictive approach to understanding the fluxes of water and energy in vegetation, ecohydrology can play an important role in developing realistic scenarios of climate change impacts on ecosystems. I think this is especially key where climate variability and climate change interact to drive both the long-term trends but also the extremes to which eocsystems respond. The uncertainty in future landscape trajectories could be considerably reduced by replacing some of the stochastic elements in vegetation models with more deterministic, if complex, ecoydrological gradients. The next logical step is trialing adaptation options in forests based on ecohydrology knowledge of different trajectories in different parts of landscapes.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Around 2004, I spent longer than I want to admit to this community on “A scale invariant coupling of plants, water, energy and terrain”, (Milne, Gupta, and Restrepo, Ecoscience, 2002) because it seemed to provide a key framework for my attempts to explain both variation in tree growth responses in mountain landscapes AND fire responses to climate across the western U.S.. It hinted at the ability to go from processes affecting a single tree to those affecting the fuels in an entire ecoregion, and for me, that scale invariance was transformative in my thinking. I still don’t think I have adequately linked what I study and publish on to those concepts, but I’ve spent a decade trying to create the historical and future variables described in that paper for my own purposes. That has been both productive and entertaining.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I Nordic ski race in winter, and train for skiing in the summer by mountain running, roller skiing, and other pursuits not considered odd in Scandinavia, and increasingly less odd in Alaska. I have no TV, a few bikes, and I prefer not to discuss how many pairs of skinny skis are in my garage. In my defense, they are not all mine, but that is in part because if my family didn’t ski, they would probably see less of me. Some people restore cars in their garages; I wax skis. Lots and lots of skis. I also have a garden that I chase moose out of regularly. One of the benefits of all that skiing and running is eating, so I cook a lot too – for my wife and me, food is entertainment, though I am not sure our two daughters always agree with that. There is an infinite amount of fun to be had in Alaska, as long as you recognize occasionally you’ll be wet and cold. But ecohydrologists know about that, right?!
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