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MEET A LEAF: KIM QUESNEL

9/30/2019

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Dr. ​Kim Quesnel is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Stanford University with the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Bill Lane Center for the American West.  @kimquesnel
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is the intersection between hydrology and ecology, and traditionally ecology has referred to the natural environment. However, given the undeniable and ever-present interconnections between people and our surroundings, I think it is important that we also include human ecosystems when we study water.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and graduate degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, with a Master’s concentration in Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology and PhD concentration in Environmental Engineering and Science.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My journey into the water world started as an undergraduate through two avenues. First, I was involved with Cal Poly’s Engineers Without Borders group, designing and planning the implementation of slow sand filters for water treatment in a remote Thai village. Over the course of the three years I was involved with the program, including a site visit, it became clear to me how central water is to every single aspect of life. Second, I participated in a summer NSF REU program at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University studying tsunami waves, which opened my eyes not only to water science and engineering, but also to research itself as I was coming from a primarily undergraduate teaching university. I then worked in environmental consulting for a few years before returning to graduate school, at which point I thought that I wanted to study fluid mechanics based on my positive experience at the wave lab.

However, I soon realized that I wanted to work on systems-level and policy-relevant water challenges. This realization was partially motivated by the fact that it was early on in the 2012­–2016 historic California drought, which highlighted the inefficiencies and shortfalls of our current water management strategies. My interests snowballed from there to where I am today, and I would classify my research as urban socio-ecohydrology. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
One emerging area that I see for all fields of hydrology is the proliferation of big data. Not only are we seeing higher frequency measurement devices or improved computing power and data storage capabilities, but also the emergence of new data sources themselves. One example is that can now develop proxies for previously difficult to quantify variables. In sociohydrology, for instance, we can use internet search frequency or news media articles to understand public awareness or interest in a meteorological event instead of relying on surveys.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite recent socio-ecohydrology paper is Breyer, Zipper, and Qui, 2018 which was published in Water Resources Research. The authors incorporated a suite of modeling techniques and data sources to paint a holistic picture of human–water interactions during drought. By combining physical attributes like streamflow and climate data with remote sensing and sociodemographic data, they were able to geospatially-explicitly demonstrate how drought can impact human water use behavior, which then feedbacks and impacts water resources. I actually thought that this paper was so elegant that I emailed the authors (who I have never met) to let them know—which is a practice that I want to continue in the future. I think it is important we create a culture of positivity in our field and let our peers know when we are excited and impressed by their work!

Two other recent papers that I like are Mini, Hogue, and Pincetl, 2014 and 2015 on urban water use in Los Angeles. Although these papers are only five years old, I feel like they were very progressive in combining big water use datasets with remote sensing data to estimate outdoor water use and the impact of restrictions.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Like many hydrologists, I love being outside! My favorite activities are mountain biking and skiing, but I also love running and hiking. A few weeks ago, I went on a backpacking trip with my mom in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains in California which was really special—we retraced the route that she was in charge of 40 years ago when she was a backcountry forest ranger in early her early 20s.
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MEET A LEAF: RYAN EMMAnUEL

9/23/2019

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 Dr. ​Ryan Emanuel is an Associate Professor and University Faculty Scholar at North Carolina State University.  ​@WaterPotential
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
In a general sense, I consider ecohydrology the study of bi-directional interactions between hydrological and ecological processes.  Much of ecohydrology could be organized under high-level questions like: how do water status and flow influence ecosystem structure and function, and how do ecosystem structure and function affect water status and flow? The boundaries of ecohydrology are fluid (no pun intended) and ever-expanding, which is something I welcome.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a BS in Geology from Duke University and graduate degrees in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I was exposed to one particular vein of ecohydrology early in graduate school.  Paolo D’Odorico, my MS committee member and eventual PhD co-advisor, worked with Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe on interactions between soil moisture and vegetation in one-dimensional water balances.  Their conceptual framework strongly influenced my early research. I paired some of their concepts with flux tower methods taught by other mentors, John Albertson and Howie Epstein, to study impacts of plant water stress on ecosystem carbon and water cycles. 

Later on, my PhD co-advisors, D’Odorico and Epstein helped me extend ideas about water stress to questions about streamflow, evapotranspiration, and biogeochemical cycling across entire watersheds.  At this scale, water is still a vital resource for ecosystem functions, but it also carries information about finer-scale ecohydrological processes from one part of the landscape to another. As an early-career scientist, collaborations with watershed hydrologists like Brian McGlynn, Lucy Marshall, and their students helped me think about ecohydrological processes as part of amazingly complex catchment systems.  For the past decade or so, my students and postdocs have taken this basic view of ecohydrology and enriched it with their own creativity and insight.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Although I feel like I work in one small corner of ecohydrology, I can see important conceptual advances on the threshold, if not already coming through the doorway of our discipline. Conceptually, ecohydrology still has a lot to learn about water’s dual role as a limiting ecological resource and as a carrier of signals across landscapes. Because we don’t have universal definitions for phenomena like water stress or for what it means for water to “carry a signal,” there are emerging opportunities to draw connections between great work happening now throughout the ecohydrology community.

I think that many in our community recognize the fluidity of ecohydrology’s scope and boundaries.  For that reason, I think it’s important to acknowledge that an emerging area of ecohydrology is its ability to look outward and connect with other fields, while still carrying out robust research at the core of our field.  For my part, I’ve begun connecting ecohydrology with broader societal questions about public policy, environmental justice, and indigenous knowledge systems.  I am a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe, a group that is indigenous to the southeastern part of the present-day US state of North Carolina.  Our territory encompasses blackwater streams and forested wetlands that provide great examples of bi-directional interactions between hydrological and ecological processes.  However, when I look at these landscapes as Lumbee person I also see deep historical and cultural relationships between people, land, and water that help define us as indigenous people.  My training in ecohydrology gave me one particular set of tools for thinking about relationships between land and water, and I consider those tools incomplete.  Lumbee people, like many indigenous peoples, I have much richer ways of understanding relationships with land and water. 

I think indigenous ways of knowing are important to share with others, because they help us see the bigger picture of water and life. Indigenous perspectives can be important to consider when we are building socio-hydrological models, developing public policies, planning fossil fuel pipelines, or engaging in a host of other activities that affect relationships between ecosystems, water, and people.  In recent years, ecohydrology has been grappling with ways to incorporate human dimensions into modeling and quantitative analysis. This is important work that can benefit from indigenous perspectives.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I don’t have a favorite ecohydrology paper, although many papers have influenced my thinking about ecohydrology through the years.  When I think about representation of indigenous perspectives in ecohydrology (or other fields), one influential paper is “A global assessment of Indigenous community engagement in climate research” by Dominique David-Chavez and Michael Gavin, published last year in Environmental Research Letters.  Focusing on published climate studies, they find most published research to be extractive rather than participatory or community-based. The paper is a call to respectful, conscientious, and responsible research partnerships with indigenous peoples. 


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have a lifelong love of paddlesports that has evolved through various stages of my life.  I am currently into canoeing and paddle boarding on blackwater streams in eastern North Carolina, sometimes alone and sometimes with family or friends.  As a Lumbee person, I descend from Indigenous peoples who have paddled canoes on these exact streams since time immemorial.  Also, one of my postdocs taught me to brew kombucha earlier this year.  I enjoy sharing kombucha with family and friends.
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MEET A LEAF: EDOARDO DALY

9/16/2019

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Dr. ​Edoardo Daly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.  
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Sometimes, I feel like ecohydrology could really be anything, because it encompasses water and ecosystems, and, as such, many studies could fall under the label of ‘ecohydrology’. This explains to me why ecohydrology spans across so many different disciplines. If I had to pick a definition of ecohydrology, however, I am fond of the first one that I read as a young student, which is given by Rodriguez-Iturbe in his WRR commentary in 2000: “Ecohydrology may be defined as the science which seeks to describe the hydrologic mechanisms that underlie ecologic patterns and processes.”

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I studied in Italy when the university degrees were designed to be 5-year long (even though it took often longer than that to finish) and students were awarded a ‘laurea’, which is equivalent to a master’s degree. I have a ‘laurea’ in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Hydraulic Engineering, both from the Politecnico di Torino.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Having studied mechanical engineering, I did not know what hydrology was before starting my PhD. I did the thesis for my master’s degree in the department of civil engineering looking experimentally at near-wall turbulence in open channels. The decision to start a PhD came when the supervisors of my master’s thesis, Luca Ridolfi and Amilcare Porporato, offered me the opportunity to go to Princeton University and be supervised by Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe for one year. I like mathematics, and became absorbed by the theory of stochastic processes, which finds applications in rainfall and soil moisture dynamics modelling. So, my introduction to ecohydrology was really through stochastic processes and the elegant analytical solutions of some of the models used to describe soil moisture dynamics. During my post-doc I had some experience in the field, and after moving to Australia I started working more in the field. I now appreciate the complexity and difficulty of building up good and long dataset and look at the diversity of ecosystems not just in terms of different parameters. I found a balance between experimental and theoretical work, even though I still prefer the modelling side of things.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think urban ecohydrology will keep us busy for a long time. The built environment adds a lot of complexity to ecosystems, generating interaction and feedback loops that need to be explored and likely discovered. There is space for studies at different scales, from individual street trees to large parks and natural reserves, these last ones rather common in Australian cities. The opportunity to design parts of urban ecosystems, for example by engineering natural areas for rainwater or stormwater harvesting, is also very intriguing. It is quite interesting to see people with very different backgrounds, such as ecologists, hydrologists, climatologists, architects and engineers, work together on problems related to urbanization and urban developments.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I do not really have a single favorite paper, but I am attached to Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. (1999) "Probabilistic modeling of water balance at a point: The role of climate, soil and vegetation" and then the series of four papers by the same group in Advances in Water Resources. These papers represented my introduction to ecohydrology via stochastic processes, and they have been my ‘daily bread’ during my PhD.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like spending my free time with Tiffani, my wife…whether it is going for walks, watch movies, cook, or whatever, it is always fun. 
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MEET A LEAF: RAFAEL ROSOLEM

9/9/2019

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Dr. Rafael Rosolem is a Senior Lecturer in Water and Environmental Engineering at the University of Bristol.  @rosolemh2o
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I see ecohydrology as the observationally-driven discipline (but not exclusively as there are very interesting and key modeling studies in the area) that help us understand how water interacts with natural ecosystems. I particularly like the strong emphases on the hypothesis-based approach in ecohydrology always focusing on understanding processes and controls.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my BSc degree in Meteorology (2002) while carrying out field research in a sugarcane plantation and woodland savannah in Sao Paulo state. My MSc degree is in Agricultural Systems Ecology (2005) also at the University of Sao Paulo and my project was about the impact of regional Amazon deforestation due to planned road paving on the hydrological cycle using an atmospheric model. I have a PhD degree in Hydrology at the University of Arizona (2010) and I studied how to improve land models using in situ observations from flux towers in the Amazon basin.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
During my first undergraduate year, I was very fortunate to get involved with fieldwork. The research in my department tended to focus more on modeling studies (numerical weather prediction and regional atmospheric modeling) but I found my way to go out and start taking measurements of soil moisture and soil respiration in sugarcane and woodland sites maintained by my undergraduate advisor. This was also my first interaction with literature focusing on ecology and biosphere-atmosphere interactions and I absolutely loved it! Knowing that the land could essentially influence the meteorology of a region blew my mind, and after that I decided that was going to be my research area of interest. The hydrology side came a few years later when working on my MSc research which looked at all components of the regional hydrological cycle affected by the Amazon deforestation. Now, given the background I acquired over the years I consider myself as an ecohydrometeorologist (it is even funnier when saying that to a family member).
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I can highlight two areas: Big data analysis and clever ways to design and maintain experimental facilities in the long-term! We are now collecting an unimaginable volume of environmental data with new technologies from drones to remote sensing satellites. In addition, traditional catchment hydrology and meteorological modeling applications have been converging in the recent past allowing for high- (or even used hyper-) resolution simulations covering countries, continents, and even the whole Earth, requiring more and more datasets. Making sense of all these data will be challenging: looking for patterns or controlling factors in order to better understand key processes related to how water is stored or leaves each component of the hydrological cycle. On the other hand, the complexity of such hydrometeorological models sometimes undermines the detection of clear environmental controls (too many processes happening simultaneously) and I still believe that simplified models (simple hypothesis-based and specific) are useful tools, especially when reaching audiences outside academia. We, ecohydrologists, will also need to come up with clever ideas for regional- and even continental-scale long-term monitoring especially these days when available funding is limited for experimental research. Maybe thinking of network of networks, citizen’s network, mobile observational platforms that have autonomy to decide where and when to go and collected data depending on the event happening.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I have two papers that really showed me the importance of ecology in hydrology and meteorology. I am not sure whether they would be classified as ecohydrology papers but they certainly showed the links between the hydrological components and the biosphere. I was still an undergraduate student when I first read these papers. The first one is the paper by Nobre et al. (1991) showing what happens to the hydroclimate over the entire Amazon basin if the rainforest is completely replaced by pasturelands.  I like to see how the land cover maps were coarsely prescribed at that time and reading it always reminds me how much progress we have made to be able to monitor and predict the dynamics of the basin at a much higher spatial resolution now. The other one is a two-part paper by Sellers et al. (1996a,1996b) and describes the Simple Biosphere Model version 2 (SiB2). I spent so much time reading these papers the first time, to really understand how biosphere and atmosphere interact at the land surface; the description of the stomatal conductance parameterization is my favorite section of the paper, where I could really see the contribution from biology and ecology to hydrology and meteorology.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I absolutely love spending time with my 9 year old daughter on weekends. We go for bike rides or parks, and sometimes play board games at home (it can get a bit rainy in the UK). I also go for nature or coastal walks with my family on weekends (the UK countryside and coast is really beautiful). I have recently start enjoying more and more reading manga and watching Japanese anime, and occasionally I play my drums (big Ramones and Dave Matthews Band fan). I also enjoy meditating and playing old video games (I’ve got a classic NES at home which is fun and always brings good memories).
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MEET A LEAF: MALLORY BARNES

9/2/2019

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Dr. Mallory Barnes in an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
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hat does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology explores interactions between the biosphere and the hydrosphere and associated feedbacks and fluxes, To me, ecohydrology is an exciting and highly interdisciplinary field, where scientists with diverse backgrounds, skills, and research interests can collaborate, interact, and leverage each other’s strengths to move science forward. The variety of thoughtful and multifaceted definitions of ecohydrology provided by others in this series exemplifies the reason I feel at home in this field. Ecohydrology provides both a theoretical framework to integrate my diverse research interests and connections with scientists with different and complementary perspectives.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Zoology from UW-Madison, where I studied evolution of stickleback fish. My Master’s was in Natural Resource and Environmental Management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where I focused on satellite remote sensing of cloud cover and evapotranspiration modeling. My PhD was in Watershed Management and Ecohydrology from the University of Arizona, where I explored dryland carbon uptake across spatial and temporal scales using remote sensing and fluxes.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My path toward ecohydrology reminds me of the quote from the Dalai Lama:  “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” I arrived at the University of Hawaii at Manoa with plans to refocus my interest in animals towards applied wildlife research. I even had a project planned to study an elusive and mysterious colony of feral wallabies (yes, wallabies!) on Oʻahu. Alas, the days of funding for descriptive studies of naturalist oddities are over, and I was back at square one.  Dr. Tomoaki Miura generously took me under his wing and invited me to be part of a project lead by Dr. Tom Giambelluca to model evapotranspiration over the Hawaiian Islands. Dr. Miura taught me the remote sensing and coding skills that became the foundation for my future research career. I then took a position under Dr. Susan Moran at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, who gave me a giant stack of scientific manuscripts to read on hydrology, dryland ecohydrology, and vegetation ecology when I first arrived to Tucson that provided the background and motivation for much of my dissertation research. My PhD co-advisor Dr. Dave Breshears’ Dryland Ecohydrology class was my first formal study of ecohydrology. At first, I felt overwhelmed by the both the breadth of topics and techniques relevant to this community, and the “messiness”, inherent in such interdisciplinary and complex problems. As I continued through the course however, I realized that such complexities are opportunities to advance our understanding of important questions, and I don’t have to personally know everything, that’s what collaborators are for!

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Developing new quantitative approaches to extract insights from the deluge of environmental data available from satellites and coordinated sensor networks is what excites me most about ecohydrology now. Due to advances in sensors, networks, and other infrastructure, vast quantities of data on biological, physical, and environmental properties are now accessible on the Internet. Combined with an ethos of open science and data sharing, such advances in data availability have the capacity to transform ecohydrology. In particular, I am interested in assessing the impacts of climate change on ecosystems across spatial and temporal scales by integrating data from heterogenous sources in the context of interdisciplinary research.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
In ecohydrology, soil is the interface between the hydrosphere and the biosphere, and  soil moisture is a critical variable that drives key ecological and hydrological processes. Despite thinking a lot about soil and soil moisture, I was unaware of the ubiquitous and diverse communities of living organisms in arid and semi-arid soils until I read Jayne Belnap’s 2003 Paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Biological soil crusts are incredibly fragile, invisible to the untrained eye, and are crucial to the health and productivity of desert ecosystems. At the beginning of this paper, I didn’t know what biological soil crusts were, and by the end, I was both fascinated by their multifaced role in ecosystems and wholly convinced they should be of top conservation priority. This paper exemplifies excellent scientific writing – it is clear, concise, holds the reader’s interest throughout, and a delight to read. Also, it turned me into a militant trail stayer-onner - don’t bust the crust!
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to hike, especially with my partner and dog. I am rediscovering my love of water activities after leaving the desert including swimming, canoeing, stand-up paddling, and waterskiing. I love games (board, card, and video) and trivia.  I also have been enjoying going to opera, ballet and other musical performances put on by IU’s renowned Jacobs School of Music. 
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