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MEET A LEAF: SIMON ZWIEback

8/26/2019

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Dr. Simon Zwieback was a post doctoral scholar in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.  He is now with the Geophysical Institute & Alaska Satellite Facility at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology by its very nature hints at much more than its narrow definition might suggest, viz. the study of how the water cycle and ecosystems are interconnected. At its core is the attempt to understand complex systems with a multitude of abiotic and biotic (including anthropogenic and societal) components. As such, I see it as representative of a much wider range of emergent fields such as biogeomorphology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
BSc and MSc in geodesy and geophysics (Vienna University of Technology);
PhD in environmental engineering (ETH Zurich)


How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
In quite an indirect way, via microwave remote sensing. In my PhD I tried to understand how changes in vegetation and soil water content bias observations of subtle surface elevation changes obtained by the remote sensing technique radar interferometry. In regions underlain by ice-rich permafrost, surface displacements are particularly closely coupled to numerous (eco)hydrological processes. I quickly became fascinated by the complexity and variability of these ecosystems. A recent line of research has been to understand how shrub expansion influences the water cycle and soil thermal dynamics.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Ecohydrological processes play a major role in determining the fate of Arctic permafrost landscapes. It would perhaps be inaccurate to consider this as an emerging area. For instance, the importance of plants for permafrost soils, geomorphology and hydrology (including ground ice dynamics) has long been recognized and studied in an interdisciplinary spirit. However, I believe that ecohydrologists can provide renewed impetus for the study of these rapidly changing ecosystems. Important questions include the feedbacks, and variability therein, between shrub expansion and permafrost conditions, or how plants influence the trajectories of various form of thermokarst (terrain changing permafrost degradation) across time scales.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I remember enjoying reading the Perennially Frozen Peatlands in the Western Arctic and Subarctic of Canada (S. C. Zoltai and C. Tarnocai; Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences; 1975, 12(1): 28-43) It is a synthesis of what seems to be many years of field observations of permafrost peatlands. I particularly like its wide scope and how the authors stress the variability of permafrost and ground ice, vegetation and emerging landforms within and across regions. Like many older papers, it contains a wealth of important little insights.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Reading; outdoor activities; eating
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MEET A LEAF: MATTHIAS SPRENGER

8/19/2019

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Dr. Matthias Sprenger is a DFG-funded postdoctoral research fellow at the North Carolina State University and collaborates closely with the Surface Hydrology and Erosion Group at IDAEA-CSIC, Barcelona to work on water ages in a Mediterranean catchment using stable isotopes. He is editor of the new blog of the EGU Hydrology Section.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As ecohydrology aims for a better understanding of the relationship between ecological systems and the hydrological cycle, ecohydrological research is inherently interdisciplinary work. Therefore, I see great opportunity for terrestrial ecohydrology in the framework of Critical Zone Science. To me, this approach seems to be an outstanding way to include the knowledge and methods of various Earth system sciences as a way of improving our expertise of how water is stored and routed in the subsurface and released either back into the atmosphere via evapotranspiration or recharging streams and groundwater. Therefore, ecohydrology means collaborating, communicating and coordinating across our individual scientific comfort zones as a way of gaining new insights.
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I obtained by Bachelor’s degree in Geoecology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany followed by a year abroad at the University of Iceland, Reykjavik as an Erasmus student (European exchange program) to take classes in the environmental science program. I earned a Master’s degree in BioGeosciences from the University Koblenz-Landau, Germany and then I completed a PhD in Hydrology at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
During my undergraduate studies, I spent my summers working in an engineering office for fluvial ecosystem restoration where I explored firsthand the ways in which geomorphological and ecological features of a river interact. I subsequently learned about countless examples of ecological and hydrological feedbacks during my interdisciplinary undergraduate studies. My Master’s thesis project, which examined diversity effects on tree water use at an experimental plantation in the tropics, ignited my interest for terrestrial ecohydrology. Ever since, I have been motivated to obtain a better understanding of soil – plant interactions in the water cycle. I was lucky to learn about stable isotopes of water during my PhD studies, which is a great tool for exploring how water moves in the subsurface and trees.
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
From my very biased experience over the last years, I see that much effort is being placed on the development and understanding of isotope techniques. The methodological progress of isotope analysis has enabled larger sample numbers, higher sampling frequencies, and a generally broader application of stable isotopes of water. For example, if you compare recently published isotope studies tackling ecohydrological questions with studies from a decade ago, you will probably recognize distinct sampling designs – simply because such sampling strategies are far more feasible nowadays. However, we still have to know when and where to sample to increase the cost-benefit of our isotope approaches. As with most hydrological research, ecohydrologists also struggle with the scaling issue. Thus, I think that experimental work combining deuterium labeled water with hydrogeophysics or remote sensing to bridge the scales could be an answer to our current limitations.
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One of my favorite papers is “Partitioning of soil water among canopy trees in a seasonally dry tropical forest” by Meinzer et al. (1999) simply because it was the first paper that I read which used stable isotopes to study root water uptake. As a Master’s student, I was jealous of the researchers’ extensive isotope tracer data set taken many years earlier at a nearby site. While I was studying plant water use with much more limited (hydrometric) information about water, I knew it would be valuable to include isotope data – not knowing I would be part of that isotope ecohydrology community just a few years later.
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to play soccer and ultimate frisbee and I enjoy exploring the world with my family – if possible, on hikes and by bike.
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MEET A LEAF: GABY KATUL

8/12/2019

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Dr. Gabriel (Gaby) Katul is a Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is one branch of hydrology, which is the science that deals with the occurrence, distribution, movement, and properties of water on earth. The ‘eco’ in ecohydrology aims to delineate the stores and movement of water most pertinent to ecological processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree (BE) was in civil engineering from the American University of Beirut (in 1988) with emphasis on structural engineering.  My Masters of Science (MS) degree was in agricultural engineering from Oregon State University (in 1990), whereas my PhD degree was in Hydrological Sciences from University of California in Davis (in 1993).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Mainly during my MS thesis work, which focused on crop water requirements, evapotranspiration, irrigation systems design, soil water movement, and root-water uptake.  This work brought into focus connections between physical and biological processes distributed among several established disciplines such as agronomy, micrometeorology, soil physics, and engineering.         

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
This is a tough question because the ‘interface’ between what is known and what is unknown remains diffuse as expected in scientific disciplines that are still in their embryonic state.  Over the past 25 years, it has become apparent that ‘ecological sciences’ are perhaps driving the ‘big science questions’ whereas hydrology is providing the mathematical machinery and theoretical/numerical tactics to tackle them.  My own biases are water movement in the soil-plant-atmosphere system.  As a civil engineer, I remain fascinated by the fact that much of the plant biomass is supporting a number of hydraulic networks that move water and nutrients around without pumping.  This recognition opens up the possibility of using ‘nature’ to learn and perhaps inspire the engineering of new ways to move fluids with minimal energy expenditures.  For this reason, I continue to be interested in how xylem hydraulics, sugar transport in the phloem, optimality theories, water delivery to the rhizosphere, water vapor movement by a turbulent atmosphere, etc… can all be combined together to understand whole plant responses to water stress on short-time scales, and emerging plant water usage strategies on the long time scales.  This is a problem that requires understanding network theory (especially networks on networks), fluid mechanics at low and high Reynolds number, micro-fluidics, osmoregulation and front propagation, cavitation, long-range mass transport, statistical mechanics, ecophysiology – and an engineering intuition about connections between structure and function.  Hence, it remains a problem that stimulates the study of new topics spanning mathematics, physics, biology, and optimal designs in engineering.   It is also a great gym to train graduate students because, like biology where ‘lab rotations’ are integral to a curriculum – ecohydrology offers numerous ‘problem rotations’ that expose students to diverse experimental, theoretical and data analytic methods.     

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Again, this is a tough one.  From the plant perspective and my learning how to combine optimality theories with physical and physiological laws to describe stomatal kinetics – I would rank the 1978 paper by Ian Cowan high on the list:
Cowan, I. R. "Stomatal behaviour and environment." In Advances in botanical research, vol. 4, pp. 117-228. Academic Press, 1978.
From the plant-atmosphere interaction perspective, the work by Monin and Obukhov (1954) shaped micrometeorology and its implications to ecohydrology (especially for measuring and modeling water fluxes using micrometeorological methods.
Monin, A. S. and Obukhov, A. M.: 1954, ‘Osnovnye zakonomernosti turbulentnogo pere-meshivanija v prizemnom sloe atmosfery (Basic Laws of Turbulent Mixing in the Atmosphere Near the Ground)’, Trudy geofiz. inst. AN SSSR24(151), 163–187.


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Reading and hiking though not always in ​this order.
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MEET A LEAF: ELIE BOU-ZEID

8/5/2019

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Dr. Elie Bou-Zeid is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Directs the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab at Princeton University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
It is intersection of the biosphere and hydrosphere, which we know is so critical to both systems. My own interest is largely in urban ecohydrology where ecosystems provide many benefits to the built environment such as shade and a relaxing landscape. After decades of misguided urban drainage design, we now realize that retaining water in the city is key to adding more ecosystem benefits such as flood prevention and evaporative cooling. But the anthropic impact on urban ecosystems is so great that they often behave more like engineered than natural systems, and as an environmental engineer I am fascinated by urban ecohydrology since it is the complex interface of human-made and natural systems.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree is in Mechanical Engineering where I focused on fluid mechanics. Then I got a Masters in Environmental and Water Resource Engineering focusing on environmental fluid mechanics and I pursued the same specialty for my Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I first starting working on fluid flow and heat transfer in cities, their complex rough surface makes this a very stimulating problem. But then I quickly found out that you cannot study heat in cities without understanding ecohydrology. Vegetation and water, or their absence, are the main determinants of urban climates as our research has shown.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Urban ecohydrology of course. It is complex and as I said often quite unnatural and engineered. Many urban trees are non-native to the regions where they are planted. Irrigation and human intervention can sustain very lush vegetation even in cities like Phoenix. These plants then alter the hydro-thermal environment, as well as atmospheric chemistry, thermal comfort, energy consumption, and human wellbeing. Understanding urban ecosystems and how they will influence the 70% of the human species who will live in cities by 2050 is a very important challenge.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It is difficult to select a favorite paper but I can tell you which paper had a big impact on my thinking on urban ecohydrology. The paper is titled “The International Urban Energy Balance Models Comparison Project: First Results from Phase 1”, by Grimmond et al., to which there is a phase 2 follow-up paper also. That paper unequivocally showed that evapotranspiration is extremely important to predicting urban environmental conditions, and then also exposed what a poor job we do in modeling that process. It made it clear to me that this was a wide gap that needs to be bridged.
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love traveling and discovering new places, countries, cultures and cuisines. My favorite hiking trails are the streets of cities I am newly discovering. I enjoy movies, theatre, music, and some physical activity when I have time to spare. 
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