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MEET A LEAF: SIMONE FATICHI

8/27/2018

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Dr. Simone Fatichi is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
My view of ecohydrology is of an interdisciplinary science that studies the interactions between ecosystems (mostly terrestrial ecosystems) and the water cycle. In this regard, ecohydrology requires expertise in different topics and is a cornerstone discipline to address societal challenges related to climate and land use changes, food security, and sustainable use of ecosystem services.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I obtained my Bachelor and Master degrees in Environmental and Earth Engineering but my curricula was very much oriented toward water-related disciplines as hydrology, fluvial hydraulics, and design of hydraulic infrastructure with a solid background in numerical methods and modeling. Only during my PhD and afterwards, I studied topics as terrestrial ecology, plant physiology, soil biogeochemistry and atmospheric science. While my formal training was mostly in hydrology, through self-education, active research, and collaboration activities, I enjoyed very much to cover the gaps that link my original background with these disciplines.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As a young boy, I had always been captivated by meteorology and extreme weather phenomena. While I did not pay much attention to this inclination in my undergraduate studies, very likely this passion was revived by the study of the water cycle. After having started a PhD in hydrology, I soon discovered that to properly understand and quantify the water cycle, evaporation and transpiration are way more important than the limited space devoted to these subjects in old hydrology textbooks would suggest. Having to deal with transpiration, automatically means having to deal with plants.  These alive components, when confronted with the lifeless elements, which are typically the subject of studies in engineering, finally sparked my fascination for water-vegetation interactions, i.e., ecohydrology.

Additionally, while I recognize the “beauty” of simple explanations and parsimonious structures able to highlight the emergence of general governing principles, I am inclined to be attracted more by complexity, by behaviors that can only be explained combining multiple processes. Also in this case, ecohydrology was the perfect venue to direct my interests.  


What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
While I think we understand quite well various aspects of water-vegetation interactions observed in the past, there is still a great deal of uncertainty in how water cycle and ecosystems will respond to mutated environmental conditions, as changes in climate (e.g., precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentration, vapor pressure deficit). Finding innovative ways for studying ecohydrological responses to environmental changes across different scales from the leaf to the globe is probably not a completely new problem but nevertheless extremely important.

Furthermore, I think there will be an increasing attention toward “urban ecohydrology”. There are major concerns related to ecosystem transformations and alterations of water, carbon and nutrient cycles in urban areas, where population is increasing and land-use is changing dramatically. An often-proposed mitigation strategy to counteract negative effects of urbanization on micrometeorology, hydrology, biogeochemical cycle, is the increase of vegetation in cities. There is a critical need to understand and quantify the interactions and associated feedbacks between ecological systems and the hydrological cycle in urban environments.


Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
If I have to select a single article, which modified my way of looking at ecohydrology, this is Ivanov et al.,  2008, WRR. I read this article when it was still unedited and I was at the beginning of my PhD. It was an article describing a model, but I was captured by the level of mechanistic representation and description of hydrological and vegetation processes, especially when compared with the large degree of empiricisms in methods I was taught during my studies. For the first time, I realized that we could use conservation of mass, energy, and momentum and reliable parameterizations for a combined modeling of the hydrological cycle and vegetation dynamics.

Ivanov, V. Y., R. L. Bras, and E. R. Vivoni (2008), Vegetation hydrology dynamics in complex terrain of semiarid areas: 1. A mechanistic approach to modeling dynamic feedbacks, Water Resour. Res., 44, W03429, doi:10.1029/2006WR005588.

 
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I am becoming always more addicted to traveling. I travel often for work related reasons, but I enjoy taking a few additional days, whenever I can, to explore new landscapes, cultures, meet people with different backgrounds. I also enjoy very much sports, such as soccer, cycling, and swimming even though my time commitment in this regard is much less than it should be. 
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MEET A LEAF: NAOMI TAGUE

8/20/2018

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 Dr. Naomi Tague is an Associate Professor of Hydrology in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California - Santa Barbara.  She is also Director of the Tague Team Lab for Ecohydrology and Informatics.  Twitter: @TagueTeamLab | ​@naomi_eco_hydro
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?

Ecohydrology studies the intersection between biology and hydrology. I focus on plants and try to build models of how much water plants use but also how much water plant need and what happens to plant physiology and ecosystem structure and function when water availability change.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?

My undergraduate degree was in Systems Design Engineering (at the University of Waterloo). Learning to think about ‘things’ as systems and how to use mathematics to describe system dynamics was a great foundation. My graduate degrees were in Geography at the University of Toronto – it was there that I began studying the environment and in particular the spatial and temporal dynamics of ecohydrology.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
 
I started thinking about ecohydrology during my PhD.  During my PhD I spent a lot of time developing a hillslope scale hydrologic routing model that was linked to an ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycling model. I then used this model to look at how forest roads changed the routing of water and what the implications were for downslope forest water use. I didn’t really think about this as ‘eco-hydrology’ at the time – but I did think a lot about spatial patterns of forest water use – I still think about this – and how vegetation water use changes with climate, with urban design, with fire…

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?

Innovation in data: new data sets and new ways of using data are changing eco-hydrology.  New high spatial and spectral resolution data from remote sensing – whether it is from drones or satellites, new automated sampling methods, new ways using isotopes or genetic information combined with emerging data science/machine learning techniques – all of this will lead to new insights into ecohydrology.  My sense is this evolution of data-science  will be especially important for enhancing our understanding of plants and how they function – including how they respond to water availability, to climate and, to disturbance.  Plasticity of plant function is still poorly represented in our ecohydrologic models, even our conceptual ones, but this is changing. 

The eco-hydrology of urban environments is also a favorite area of mine – we increasingly live in urban environments – and improving our understanding of ecohydrology in urban systems can help us make cities more sustainable.   

 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really like Asbjornsen, H. et al. (2011), Ecohydrological advances and applications in plant–water relations research: a review, Journal of Plant Ecology, 4(1-2), 3–22, doi:10.1093/jpe/rtr005.  It is just a great review of key themes– and offers the dual ecohydrology perspective that includes both how water impacts plants and how plants impact water.
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Like many who study the environment, I hike, bike, swim and play – I love being in the forest. I’ve also have studied tai chi for many years – and really appreciate that I  have  a daily meditative but also physical practice. Music is great – summer outdoor jazz concerts are much fun.  I am also an orthodox jew and truly enjoy the learning from the many teachers I have had and books that I have read on what that means. 
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MEET A LEAF: YANNIS Dialynas

8/13/2018

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Dr Yannis Dialynas is a Lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Cyprus.   Email: ydialy01@ucy.ac.cy
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
In Greek, ecohydrology refers to the scientific field studying the influence of ecological processes on water fluxes in ecosystems.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my Ph.D. degree in Hydrology and Water Resources at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017 under the advising of Provost Rafael L. Bras, my M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, and my Diploma in Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in 2011.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As a hydrologist modeling watershed-scale hydrologic processes in the critical zone, during my PhD in Georgia Tech I started working with vegetation dynamics and associated feedbacks on water fluxes. My research involved developing process-based distributed models focusing on this fascinating interdisciplinary area, trying to improve my understanding on complex ecohydrologic controls on sediment fluxes and carbon cycling.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
In my opinion, our knowledge of how ecohydrology controls watershed-scale hydrogeomorphic processes and carbon cycling in diverse ecosystems remains limited. Improving our understanding on these complex linked processes can be an important step towards addressing global problems with vast socio-economic implications and assessing the role of natural and human forcings on the course of global change.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
A recent work that is worth mentioning is the award-winning: “Ecohydrologic role of solar radiation on landscape evolution” published by Omer Yetemen, Erkan Istanbulluoglu, Homero Flores‐Cervantes,  Enrique Vivoni, and Rafael Bras in Water Resources Research (2015), which helps explain how ecohydrologic processes control hillslope asymmetry. This interdisciplinary research paper describes the development of a coupled model that helped understanding the influence of solar radiation on watershed evolution with emphasis on the key role of ecohydrology.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I find music extremely exciting!  I play the violin and the bass guitar.
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MEET A LEAF: MARK JOHNSON

8/6/2018

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Mark S. Johnson is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada.  Twitter: @ecohydrologist
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I think of ecohydrology as the processes and mechanisms by which ecology affects water flows. Eco as the modifier of hydrology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Agricultural Engineering (now Biological Systems Engineering) at Virginia Tech, where I also completed a co-op position with the US Geological Survey – Office of Surface Water. My Masters was in Agricultural and Biological Engineering @CUSoilWater (the Soil and Water Lab at Cornell). Then I did my PhD in Soil, Crop and Atmospheric Sciences, also at Cornell.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I grew up in southwestern Virginia, 50m from the eastern continental divide and just barely within the Mississippi River basin (via Strubles Creek -> the New River -> Ohio River -> Mississippi River). That had me thinking about water flows from early days. Ecohydrology came as a natural extension of earlier interests in soil and water topics, and in relation to my PhD work studying carbon and water interactions in the Amazon forests. I was really fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time in lowland headwaters of the Amazon in northwestern Mato Grosso, which got me fully hooked on ecohydrology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Not to confuse things with too many modifiers, but I see socio-ecohydrology as an important extension of ecohydrology. How do human water uses impact ecohydrological processes? The concepts of “watershed services” and “hydrologic ecosystem services” get at this a bit, but tend to focus more on the benefits that society derive from ecohydrological processes. When thinking of integrated water resources management, we also need to consider how much water is needed to maintain these critical ecohydrological functions.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really like “Quantifying regional scale ecosystem response to changes in precipitation: Not all rain is created equal”, Brooks et al. (2011) in Water Resources Research, doi:10.1029/2010WR009762, which applies hydrologic synthesis to an ecohydrologic framework. I like their data fusion of phenological parameters from remote sensing (e.g., NDVI) with derived hydrological parameters such as catchment wetting (i.e. the fraction of precipitation left for infiltration and potentially available to vegetation and evapotranspiration after quickflow has diverted some water downstream and out of the catchment).

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Since it’s now summer in the northern hemisphere, it’s been fun camping with my family, getting out on the water for a bit of kayaking or small boat sailing (I’m barely competent at those activities, so maybe “out in the water” is more accurate), and playing music with my kids. 
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