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MEET A LEAF: Sarah H. Ledford

9/28/2020

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Dr. Sarah Ledford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State University. Twitter: @SLedford_
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 What does ecohydrology mean to you?
 The interaction between ecological processes and water quality and quantity. How does the ecology of a system (from microbes to mega-fauna to algae to trees) impact where water is coming from, the timing of the water, the associated dissolved (and particulate…and bigger!) material in that water, and where that water and material in the water end up! I think it’s important to frame ecohydrology as a topic to be studied for all fluxes and reservoirs of the hydrologic cycle. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
I have a BA in Earth Science from Vassar College and a PhD in Earth Science from Syracuse University.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As for many of us, running around in streams, picking up rocks, and poking bugs was one of my main past-times, even in high school, because I grew up in the suburbs. My sub-topic of ecohydrology really focuses on anthropogenic impacts, so Walter and Merritts’ 2008 paper on the impact of mill-dam ponds on sediment legacies and stream structure what the paper that made the light-bulb go off for me- I wanted to understand what humans have changed about rivers and streams. My undergraduate department was small, so we didn’t have hydrology, and given our location in the Hudson Valley, geomorphology really focused on glacial impacts.  This paper was the one that made me think about how large our physical impact has been on the landscape, even in places we think are ‘natural’. After reading this paper, I worked on an honor’s thesis that looked at the impact remanent ponds on my campus had on DIN. It was a massive failure, but the questions about human impacts on water chemistry persisted! When I got to graduate school, my advisor’s main specialty at that point was hyporheic exchange, but we started sampling a local stream for a field method’s class and found some fascinating patterns.  My PhD work evolved into digging into those patterns to figure out their drivers (which end up being strongly controlled by anthropogenic impacts on surface water-groundwater interactions). Since then, my work has expanded to think about other systems where human influence dominates (small streams receiving wastewater treatment plant effluent for my post-doc and extremely urbanized environments now in Atlanta).  

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
High-temporal loggers and the massive collection of data without understanding what we are collecting and the questions we are asking (and I’m guilty here, too!). There have been some great calls-to-arms on this, including Burns et al. 2019 in WIRES Water.  Suddenly the world is pretty wide open as far as data collection goes, but I think we need to step back, make sure we are framing solid questions, before we dive in.  We also need to acknowledge how much ‘bad’ data may be collected and separate it from ‘data that does not make sense’.  ‘Bad’ data are due to poor QAQC, poor siting, etc., and really can’t be used.  ‘Data that does not make sense’ are much more exciting and will lead to new questions! And, I think there are important regulatory implications for high-temporal data: when we suddenly see how much daily variation there is in water quality, how can we best advise a sampling regime that measures the over-all health of a system? Have we been mis-representing the health of systems from grab samples? Does this start to explain the disconnect between ecological indicators of health we’ve seen in cities (such as poor EPT counts) despite the fact that our water quality is ‘improving’?

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I love AJ Reisinger and all’s 2019 Ecological Applications paper about the impact of stream restoration on in-stream metabolism.  It is such a clear example of how people have gone in, ‘fixed’ a problem, but not thought about the other ecological implications of their ‘fix’ (in this case, removal of riparian vegetation and the impact increased light availability has on the stream). And on the opposite side of the argument, Pennino et al 2014 (in Biogeochemistry) thinks about the impact stream burial and removal of light has had in cities! 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Talk long walks around Atlanta with my dog, drink beer around a fire-pit, read books, and watch too much TV! I also love to cook and try new recipes. And as a new home-owner, I’m up to my elbows in small home improvement projects, especially getting garden beds up and running and working on building raised beds for tomatoes!
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MEET A LEAF: Marccus Hendricks

9/21/2020

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Dr. Marccus D. Hendricks, Ph.D., MPH is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning 
and the Director of Stormwater Infrastructure Resilience and Justice (SIRJ) Lab in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland – College Park, MD.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
The study of the relationship between water and green spaces and flow and permeability dynamics that support the natural management of water, both in terms of water quantity and water quality. Processes that if replicated and restored can play a critical role in addressing stormwater runoff, groundwater recharging, nutrient treatment, and other ecosystem services, particularly in human-built environments. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
My undergraduate work is in psychology and health promotion. My masters is in public health and my Ph.D. is in urban and regional science. 

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My pathway to ecohydrology was quite serendipitous in some ways and systematic in others. Growing up in a community plagued by flooding planted a seed of questioning the management of water and related infrastructure. As a first generation college student, however,  I wasn’t quite sure what a career in that space looked like. Nevertheless, I did know that emergency and paramedicine was one layer of support, particularly in response to these events. So my original plan was to pursue a career as a firefighter/EMT. Toward the end of my undergraduate career I was encouraged by some of my professors to look into public health and building on the health promotion background within the context of public health emergencies. Upon completing my masters I realized that public health still wasn’t getting after the root cause of the issue of flooding, but certainly played a part in public exposure and impact. When looking into PhD programs with a focus on hazards and disasters, I learned of a center focused on hazard reduction and recovery that happened to be located in the landscape architecture and urban planning department. I went on to discover that there were issues related to land use, infrastructure, and the development of the natural and built environment that essentially set the stage for urban hydrology and water management, particularly stormwater runoff that leads to flooding. The rest is history.  Since my PhD studies I’ve expanded my research program to explicitly include ecohydrology within a stormwater infrastructure planning and management research program toward flood hazard mitigation and improved water quality. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I see environmental and climate justice as an important emerging area in ecohydrology for both its human and social implications in general and the justice specific narrative in terms of ensuring that ecological restoration and resilience are applied fairly across all segments of the population irrespective of race, ethnicity, national origin, or class, particularly when ecohydrology intersects with urban environments. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’d have to say Amy Vanderwarker’s report chapter on water and environmental justice because it was one of those earlier pieces for me that provided an overarching framework for issues of water specifically including ecohydrology within an environmental justice framework. In her piece she touches on everything from water and land management to drinking water quality and provides policy and case study examples demonstrating the human justice side of water, infrastructure, and hydrology. 

Vanderwarker, A. (2012). Water and environmental justice. A Twenty-First Century US Water Policy, 52.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Outside of work, I enjoy running and biking around Washington DC, specifically the tidal basin. During what I like to call BC (Before COVID), I enjoyed live music and attending concerts. 
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MEET A LEAF: Patricio Magliano

9/14/2020

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Dr. Patricio N. Magliano is a research scientist in the Environmental Studies Group in the Institute of Applied Mathematics of San Luis, National University of San Luis and CONICET, Argentina.
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​What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is an amazing discipline that studies the relations between vegetation dynamics and the water cycle in human-domain environments. Although ecohydrology comprises very different situations, I especially focus on water-limited environments (drylands). Drylands have the particularity that carbon and water cycles are highly coupled and the interventions made by humans (e.g. land use/cover change, livestock intensification) have large, sometimes not reversible, impacts. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
My undergraduate degree is in Agronomy from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then, I made my Ph.D. entitled “Surface dynamics of water in semi-arid plains: the role of rainfall and vegetation cover” at the same university.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I finished my undergraduate career, I moved from Buenos Aires city to San Luis city to start my Ph.D. San Luis is a quite small city located in the middle of native dry forests (Dry Chaco ecoregion) that were been converted rapidly and massively into pastures and rainfed croplands. In my first’s field trips, I watched how land cover change and other human decisions transform the ecosystems largely changing water dynamics. To see this by my own eyes, and the company of different scientists of the “Environmental Studies Group” that were trying to understand them, were the main motivations to work in ecohydrology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
For sure, “rainwater harvesting” is a very important area where scientists have a lot to do. Rainwater harvesting has been essential for the establishment of human settlements in many drylands of the world that lacked suitable surface or groundwater resources. First experiences data from 3000 years B.C. Nowadays, most of the drylands of the world depend on limited rainfall inputs to generate primary and secondary production, but in some areas, people developed different techniques to harvest a small proportion of rainfall, store it in small dams, and use it to produce small farms or to water supply for livestock. A small amount of water in a dry site can make possible human life and production without generating regional undesirable consequences. To understand the ecohydrological relations between rainfall, soil, vegetation and human behaviors is the first step to improve rainwater harvesting systems.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Yes, I like very much “Vegetation patches and runoff erosion as interacting ecohydrological processes in semiarid landscapes” from Ludwig et al. (2005). This paper explains the relations between rainfall-runoff processes and vegetation growth at small scales (e.g. patches of 1 m2). Runoff was always considered as an unproductive flux in drylands because represents a fraction of rainfall that cannot be transpired by vegetation. This paper shows that runoff of a bare soil patch can be captured by a vegetated patch enhancing vegetation production at the stand scale (100 ha). This is a mechanism that drylands have to be more efficient at using the limited water of rainfall. 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like fishing, going for walks, making gardens and playing soccer with my children. I also enjoy watching soccer on the TV (San Lorenzo is my favorite team) and listening to music particularly national rock such as “Los fundamentalistas del aire acondicionado” or “Divididos”.
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MEET A LEAF: Thibault Datry

9/7/2020

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 Dr Thibault Datry is a Senior Scientist at INRAE (French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment), in Lyon, France. He leads the Multiscale Ecohydrology lab (EcoFlowS). Twitter: @tdatry, @EcoFlowS. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is generally defined as an interdisciplinary science that links ecology and hydrology, typically exploring how physical processes interact with biodiversity and ecological processes. For me, and perhaps due to my limited background in physics, it resonates simpler as I am focusing on how the lack of flow or water, due to drying events, determine biodiversity and ecological processes in river networks. In other words, I study the ecohydrology of rivers without water.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degrees are in Zoology and Environmental Sciences, from the Université de Lyon. My MS and PhD are in General Ecology from the same University.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
During my MS and PhD, I explored the ecohydrology of hyporheic zones and shallow alluvial aquifers. Both systems are ideal arenas to develop strong interactions between physical and biological disciplines. Not much can be understood about the ecology of these ecosystems without quantifying their physical functioning (eg SW-GW interactions, vertical hydraulic gradients, water residence times, sediment hydraulic conductivity and porosity). After this, I moved to the south island of New Zealand (at NIWA), where the hyporheic zones and aquifers I was supposed to study were underneath an intermittent (and quite famous) river, the Selwyn River flowing across the Canterbury plain by Christchurch. This gradually drove me to explore some sort of “extreme” ecohydrology, where the absence of flow and water in river networks can be so determinant for explaining ecological patterns in space and time that the physical-biological interactions occurring during flowing phases become somehow secondary. Exciting too is the idea of whether a saturated zone located below a dry riverbed can be called a hyporheic zone and function like hyporheic zones in perennial rivers and streams.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
In my opinion, a pivotal emerging area of river ecohydrology is a paradigm shift: for decades, we assumed river channels were perennial and those experiencing drying events were marginal. We today know intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams are dominating most landscapes across every continents and climates, and this will certainly increase due to global change. However, all riverine conceptual models and most applied tools and guidelines that have been produced come from, and are intended for, perennial rivers! Thankfully, various efforts are on-going in different countries to accompany or push this paradigm shift!

I also think the ecohydrology of hyporheic zones is still lagging behind “surface” ecohydrology and recent methodological developments (sampling methods, tracers, molecular tools, modelling, …) allow today to explore further how water flow influences the biodiversity and ecological functions in hyporheic zones and subsurface environments. While most scientists and managers are today aware of the importance of hyporheic zones, producing flow-ecology relationships in these hidden ecosystems is needed to help incorporating them into conservation, restoration and management plans and practices.

Another emerging area is be to spatialized ecohydrological processes at the network scale, following the recent conceptual development of meta-ecosystems. For example, how SW-GW (surface water-ground water) interactions are organized spatially within river networks, are they general, transferable rules and patterns, what are the key drivers and their temporal dynamics? A key component to consider at such scale is how humans benefit from and alter (physically, chemically, biologically) these interactions, in a context of global change. Another path is coupling physical (flow dynamics, including flow intermittence in the longitudinal, vertical and lateral dimensions), biogeochemical (resources dynamics, including dissolved and particulate compounds) and biological (consumer metacommunity dynamics, including functional aspects) processes at such scale, in the lens of global change. Using process-based models and meta-modelling will allow, from a management perspective, to identify tipping points and bottlenecks to avoid and thus determine safe operational spaces. Besides improving our understanding of the ecological integrity of river networks, such efforts will help bridging the gap between disciplines (hydrology, geomorphology, biogeochemistry, ecology, modelling) and domains (terrestrial and aquatic, surface and groundwater). This is what we are now trying to do through a starting H2O20 project on drying river networks prone to climate change (@DRYvER_H2020). 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
This is a rather hard question as there are so many excellent ecohydrology papers that have been produced the past 2 decades! With respect to one of my favorite research themes, I would mention a review on the significance of the hyporheic zone, led by Andrew Boulton, who is a fantastic and inspiring colleague, a pioneer in several ecohydrological fields and has become a wonderful friend. All co-authors of this review have been very inspiring to my research path.
 
Boulton, A. J., Findlay, S., Marmonier, P., Stanley, E. H., & Valett, H. M. (1998). The functional significance of the hyporheic zone in streams and rivers. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 29(1), 59-81.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
One long-standing passion is music: I play the accordion (Balkan and jazz music) and keep enjoying moments with friends in different bands. I also play more and more with my 2 kids as they grow up and start playing too (trumpet, piano and guitar). We live in a fully autonomous house, off-grid in the middle of a forest of the Jura mountains by another famous intermittent river (the Albarine): gardening, looking after our goats, sheep, chicken, bees and fruit trees is another occasion to have fun (not only though!). Last, I’m back into caving after a 6y-long break as our kids can now enjoy being underground with us. Somehow, this is another way to explore SW-GW interaction.
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