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MEET A LEAF: Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi

9/24/2018

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​Dr. Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi is a Junior Fellow from the Michigan Society of Fellows, hosted in the department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI, USA). Twitter: @CGerleinSafdi, website: https://cgerleinsafdi.engin.umich.edu/
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology means looking at a landscape, with soil, trees, and the sky above them, and understanding how water moves between these three elements. I’m especially interested in plants and how they transport water between the soil and the atmosphere, how they deal with drought, and how their water status affects their rate of CO2 uptake.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I did my BSc in geosciences and my MSc in geophysical engineering, both at the Ecole et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre (EOST), an engineering school in Strasbourg, France. I then did a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University (NJ, USA). I was part of the program in Environmental Engineering and Water Resources.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Very gradually! I went into geophysics because I wanted to “find groundwater in the desert”. Turns out it’s not really what geophysical engineers do… For my masters, I worked on mapping soil moisture in Kenya. My next project was on tree roots. My PhD was on leaf water, and finally for my postdoc, I’m looking at trees from satellites to understand plant water content. It has been very interesting to study each piece of the puzzle separately throughout my education, and now I feel like I’m finally ready to look at the whole picture at once.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m fascinated by the amazing contribution that remote sensing can bring to ecohydrology. New sensors are developed and launched every year and it’s hard to keep up with all the new data, so a lot of it is underutilized. For example, microwave remote sensing can tell you about the water content of canopies. Simultaneously, we get photosynthetic activity of vegetation from solar induced fluorescence measurements. I think that ecohydrologists are really going to benefit from bringing all these different types of measurements together to get a more complete picture of the water cycle in different ecosystems. I also really love how remote sensing means that you can choose to study any place, vegetation, or climate in the world. It’s a bit like travelling but without leaving your desk!

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Tough one! I think one of my favorite papers is: Ehleringer, J. R., & Dawson, T. E. (1992). Water uptake by plants: perspectives from stable isotope composition. Plant, Cell & Environment, 15(9), 1073–1082.  It is such an elegant paper that looks at where water in plants is coming from and where it goes, depending on the season. It combines stable isotope analysis of rivers, stem, and leaves, and in just a few pages, gives the reader a very complete picture of how plants uptake water. This paper was one of the founding papers for my PhD work using stable isotopes of water to look at transpiration suppression from dew deposition.  
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I’m an avid rock climber and runner. My husband and I travel regularly for climbing and it’s a really fun way to explore a new area. I also play the viola in local orchestras and chamber music groups. Finally, I have a three-month-old daughter and my new favorite hobby is to make her laugh! 
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MEET A LEAF: Adrian Harpold

9/17/2018

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Adrian Harpold is an Assistant Professor in the The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science (NRES) at the University of Nevada, Reno where he directs the Nevada Mountain Ecohydrology Lab.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I take a very broad definition of ecohydrology, which is the interaction of water and ecosystems.  My personal interests are in the movement of water within and through terrestrial ecosystems (mountain ecosystems to be even more specific).  While the foundations of ecohydrology developed by Peter Eagleson and others focused on arid vegetation water use remain important, I am excited by a more inclusive vision of ecohydrology for the 21st century that engages a wide swath of diverse people to tackle critical societal problems.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
All of my degrees are in engineering departments that were previously agricultural engineering.  I did my undergraduate and masters degree at Virginia Tech University in the Biological Systems Engineering department.  I then completed my Ph.D. in the Biological and Environmental Engineering department at Cornell University in 2010.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I have always been interested in water since my earliest memories in the creeks in our backyard in western Washington.  During the first two summers of my undergraduate engineering degree I was a raft guide on the Snake River in Wyoming. I believe this experience focused my interests on hydrology.  During my masters degree I designed a large particle image velocimeter to measure stream discharge and started playing in streams.  For my Ph.D. work I was interested in catchment hydrology and streamflow generation processes, which led me to research projects in the Catskill mountains.  However, it was not until my first postdoctoral positions at the University of Arizona and University of Colorado that I recognized the potential to help develop the field of mountain ecohydrology, focused on montane forest ecosystems and there interactions with snow and catchment hydrology. The culmination of this scientific training and mentorship leaves me with the opinion that the ‘big’ research questions in mountain hydrology lie at the interface of hydrology and ecology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Using novel observations to better simulate mountain vegetation in hydrological models will be critical to predicting future water availability.  For example, our hydrology models often make simplistic assumptions about rooting depth and architecture, but are highly sensitive to these parameters.  Similarly, knowing at what depths vegetation are extracting water is critical to accurate predictions of response to water stress.  Another example that is a focus of my research in the Sierra Nevada, is improving understanding of how forest vegetation will respond to earlier snow melt and water inputs.  Do trees utilize earlier snowmelt and rain water?  How do these trees fare later in the season during a drier growing season? How does this alter larger scale carbon budgets?  Key to resolving these questions and vegetation in hydrological models more broadly, is leveraging new and better observations.  While I don’t expect a ‘silver bullet’ observation technique in the near future, the ability to co-locate more and more observations like eddy covariance, sap flow, and micrometerology, geophysics, and isotope hydrology to measure ecosystem water use in multiple ways has the potential to revolutionize the field.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I cannot pick a single favorite paper in ecohydrology, but the paper by Elizabeth Garcia in 2016 (Garcia et al., 2016) has all the pieces of a classic ecohydrology paper and is highly relevant to the emerging research areas identified above.  Garcia et al. show that the carbon allocation scheme of the vegetation (e.g. whether they store carbon above or below ground) has implications for water use efficiency and ultimately streamflow.  They combine observations, models, and theory to show that current ecohydrological model predictions may be neglecting key processes driving their response to climate change. Garcia et al. (2016) made me reflect considerably on linkages between water and carbon cycles in Sagehen Creek, one of their study sites, and what new observations we could leverage to answer this problem.  This paper forced me to learn new things and broaden my understanding of key ecohydrological processes, which has ultimately led to new insight and better research in this topic.
Garcia, E. S., Tague, C. L., & Choate, J. S. (2016). Uncertainty in carbon allocation strategy and ecophysiological parameterization influences on carbon and streamflow estimates for two western US forested watersheds. Ecological modelling, 342, 19-33.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
My most important work outside of office, field work, and classrooms takes place at home with my wife and almost 2-year old daughter.  We like to explore our local Sierra Nevada and Great Basin mountains, as well as do big summer camping trips in the West. When life permits, I try to sneak out for bike rides and telemark turns around Reno and Lake Tahoe.
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MEET A LEAF: Tony Parolari

9/10/2018

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Tony Parolari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at Marquette University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
By definition, ecohydrology refers to the study of interactions between ecosystems and the water cycle. However, I understand the term to more broadly represent the important role water and hydrology play in living systems, including human society – from water and food security to recreation and the sustainability of ecosystems we depend on.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Civil and Environmental Engineering. My undergraduate curriculum was focused in traditional civil engineering disciplines and my primary interests were in environmental chemistry and microbiology. As a PhD student, my coursework and research transitioned more toward ecology, hydrology, and modeling.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I’ve always seen it as more or less a random sequence of fortunate events. In my first job out of college, I worked as a hydraulic and hydrologic modeler at an engineering consulting firm in Boston. This was my first experience in hydrology outside of the classroom and I really enjoyed it. While in Boston, I got involved with the local Engineers Without Borders chapter and had the opportunity to meet a few graduate students studying hydrology and ecohydrology in the Parsons Lab at MIT. I was considering a PhD at the time and they had great things to say about the program. Lo and behold, I was accepted, joined Rafael Bras’ research group, and 11 years later I feel lucky to have had that opportunity.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think an intriguing and important next chapter for ecohydrology is the study of urban systems. Cities are creating and reclaiming green space through green stormwater infrastructure, stream restoration, urban agriculture, and redevelopment. Along these lines, I think 2 interesting research challenges will be (1) to develop methods to design and manage the water and nutrient cycles in green infrastructure and (2) to study the trade-offs and synergies between green and traditional grey infrastructure.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One paper that had a big impression on me as a young graduate student was Caylor et al. (2005), which quantified the spatial organization of soil, water balance, and vegetation in the Rio Salado river basin in New Mexico. One conclusion of this paper is that the observed spatial pattern of vegetation in the basin appears to be a combination of random processes and the vegetation actively minimizing their exposure to water stress, which depends on their location within the watershed. It integrates several major themes in ecohydrology – random variability, pattern and process, and optimality.
Caylor, K.K., Manfreda, S. and Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., 2005. On the coupled geomorphological and ecohydrological organization of river basins. Advances in Water Resources, 28(1), pp.69-86.

 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I try to spend as much time as I can outdoors, either running, hiking, or biking. Since moving near Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, I’ve recently picked up kayaking and sailing. When I’m at home, I like to cook and play guitar and piano. 
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MEET A LEAF: Angelica Maria Gomez

9/3/2018

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Angelica Maria Gomez is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Geography.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?

Ecohydrology focuses on understanding how ecological and hydrological processes are connected, what mechanisms are involved, and the feedbacks associated with them at different spatial and temporal scales. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I completed two professional degrees simultaneously in Colombia: sanitary engineering and computer science engineering. As an undergrad, I was seeking to combine both disciplines when I discovered hydrology and how modelling and software development are integrated as a tool to represent hydrologic processes. Then I did a master’s in environmental engineering where I combined hydrological modelling and spatial database design. Now I am a PhD student in Geography where I also have the opportunity to listen more carefully and discover strategies to integrate ecohydrology to social processes which I believe is a complex area that I would like to explore during my career. 
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How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I started thinking questions related to water-land cover interactions at the final stage of my master’s thesis. My research was conducted in a tropical rural and remote region where rapid land use and land cover changes were occurring due to intensification in agricultural and mining practices. I used hydrologic conceptual model’s approach to understand the groundwater recharge of a shallow aquifer. However, lack of data on land use change made it challenging to conceptualize and represent those changes in the model. Later, working on consulting projects in hydrology, I experienced the limitations that neglecting land cover and land use dynamics can cause in the decision-making processes in both, land and water management. Then, I decided I wanted to contribute to reducing these limitations during my PhD, and I found ecohydrology as an integrated discipline. Currently, I am studying the impacts vegetation change due to agricultural practices produce in the hydrologic cycle in tropical settings.  

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?   
Understanding the water and energy cycles under scenarios of change: This includes addressing data integration among remote sensing, ground observations as well as combining historical data describing ecosystems and hydrologic processes in different geographic, ecological and hydrological settings.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Asbjornsen, H., Goldsmith, G. R., Alvarado-Barrientos, M. S., Rebel, K., Van Osch, F. P., Rietkerk, M., Chen, J., Gotsch, S., Tobon, C., Geissert, D. R., Gomez-Tagle, A., Vache, K., Dawson, T. E. (2011). Ecohydrological advances and applications in plant-water relations research: a review. Journal of Plant Ecology, 4(1–2), 3–22. They present a broad spectrum of the challenges and advances of the discipline. It is a good reference paper to understand how the field has evolved and what are perspectives guiding data collection and data analysis as well as modelling techniques.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy dancing folklore especially from Colombia because it is the one I have more experience with, but I also enjoy learning about music, dance movements and traditions all over the world. Besides dancing, I hike and love going to forested and rural areas.
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