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MEET A LEAF: Giulia Vico

10/28/2019

Dr. Giulia Vico is an Associate Professor (Docent) in the Department of of Crop Production Ecology
at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me is the study of the interactions between the hydrologic cycle and life - vegetation in my research - and how such interactions are altered by and are affecting human societies.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I hold a Master (a 5-year ‘Laurea’) in environmental engineering from Polytechnic of Turin and a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from Duke University.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As an engineer and hydrologist, life was not a big part of the picture during my bachelor and masters degrees. But as a person enjoying to be out in nature, life - and plants in particular - were key. That led me naturally to being curious about the interactions between plants and hydrology.

I met ecohydrology almost by chance during my master thesis, thanks to Amilcare Porporato. I soon discovered there were many bidirectional interactions between vegetation and hydrology, and that they were shaped by the variability and unpredictability of rainfall. I was soon fascinated by the use of mathematics to explore the interactions between water and plants, using dynamical systems and stochastic processes to capture the linkages between hydrology and plant ecophysiology and, more in general, physics and biology. And I never looked back! Over the years I have transitioned from natural ecosystems to managed ecosystems, where the human dimension plays a crucial role.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
There are many exciting areas in ecohydrology. Personally I think ecohydrology is moving more and more towards studying plant-water interactions in managed ecosystems and how these interactions are shaped and shape societies and their decisions. These dimensions have clear practical implications, when we are faced with more extreme climatic conditions and the need to support an ever increasing population, with limited resources in terms of water but also land. These dimensions are also fascinating as they hinge on decision making under uncertainty, an aspect that is seldom explored in strictly STEM curricula.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
Many papers in ecohydrology inspired and continue to inspire me. But the paper that got me started in ecohydrology, when I was still a master student, is Laio et al 2001 “Plants in water-controlled ecosystems: active role in hydrologic processes and response to water stress: II. Probabilistic soil moisture dynamics” - part of a four-paper series that appeared in Advances in Water Resources. There, plant-water interactions are conceptualized via a stochastic differential equation, simple enough to be elegantly solved analytically.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to be active outdoors. Hiking up and down the mountains in a sunny day is the best. But it is also pleasant to bike in the countryside, swim in the lakes and sea, run and go skiing.

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MEET A LEAF: MITCH PAVAO-ZUCKERMAN

10/21/2019

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Dr. Mitch Pavao-Zuckerman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is reciprocal – it captures how hydrology structures and drives ecological pattern and process, but also how organisms and their interactions influence hydrologic dynamics.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Binghamton University, an M.S. in Plant and Soil Sciences from University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from the Oduym School of Ecology at the University of Georgia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Although I was working in urban riparian ecosystems and soil ecology for my PhD research, I didn’t really start thinking about or working in ecohydrology in a formal way until I moved to Tucson, AZ and started working with Travis Huxman. It was eye-opening moving from a more biogeochemical group to one that focused on physiological ecology. We would spend a lot of time waiting for rain, chasing storms, and adding our own water pulses to desert ecosystems. As an ecologist, deserts drive home the importance of water for everything we think about as ecologists – community structure, spatial distributions, species interactions, ecosystem processes. Thinking about those pulses in cities and connecting with a practitioner of urban permaculture started me working on green infrastructure as a way to reconnect ecohydrologic flows and processes in cities. Simple shifts in how and where water moves by manipulating soil, plants, and concrete has big impacts for ecology, ecosystem services, and people in desert cities. I’ve brought that urban ecohydrology focus with me to the mid-Atlantic where we’re exploring how green infrastructure influences ecohydrological fluxes and how that impacts water flows and water quality.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
So many of us seem to be drawn to understanding urban ecohydrology, but I think within that an important emerging area really gets down to understanding the role of people in ecohydrology. Be it socio-ecohydrology, socio-hydrology, whatever we want to call it, figuring out reciprocal influences between the two is going to be key to transitioning to more sustainable and resilient water systems. The frontier is really in the human side of that, getting past metrics, indices, and accounting to understanding how decisions get made – what information is (and isn’t) used, how worldviews are shaped, how institutions function as things, but also as collections of people. This really is going to require partnerships and collaboration – stepping out of how we much approach a problem from our (already interdisciplinary) ecohydrology view and listen to those who come from other ways of seeing these urban systems. This includes both people who study how decisions are made (by people, by organizations) but perhaps more importantly, working in partnership with the people and groups making decisions that affect ecohydrology.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
Picking a favorite is always hard! There were a lot of classic desert soil ecology papers from people like Diana Wall (like, Wall, D. H., and R. A. Virginia. 1999. Controls on soil biodiversity: insights from extreme environments. Appl. Soil Ecol, 13:127-150) and Walt Whitford (Whitford WG (1989) Abiotic controls on the functional structure of soil food webs. Biology and Fertility of Soils 8:1-6) that really drove home the connections between patterns of water availability and the dynamics of soil food webs- that’s really where I got my start in ecohydrology. Tardigrades get a lot press, but anhydrobiosis in nematodes is where it’s at! More recently as I think about water in the context of decision making and urban social-ecological systems, I really like this paper by Claudia Pahl-Wostl (Pahl-Wostl, Claudia. 2007. Transitions towards adaptive management of water facing climate and global change. Journal Water Resources Management 21(1): 49-62.). This paper was one of the first I encountered that got me thinking deeply about the role of people in managing water within that coupled social-ecological context. It was grounded in familiar territories of complex adaptive systems and adaptive management, but introduced me to new ways of thinking about social learning and system transformation.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to spend time with my family – getting to explore the area we’ve recently moved to brings lots of new places to visit, be it stomping in the neighborhood stream to finding hidden treasures at the Smithsonian downtown. Music is also so much fun – finding new things to listen to, seeing live music, or even getting a rare chance to lend my tenor voice to a local ensemble, all great ways for me to relax and have fun.

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MEET A LEAF: RUSS SCOTT

10/14/2019

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Dr. Russell Scott is a Research Hydrologist at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Southwest Watershed Research Center in Tucson, Arizona.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
The study of the interactions between plants and the water cycle.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
University of Arizona    Hydrology and Water Resources         Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology            Civil and Environmental Eng./Hydrology M.S.
Colorado State University        Mathematics/Philosophy          B.S.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My educational lineage began with Dara Entekhabi (MIT) and Randy Koster (NASA), who were direct disciples of the Grand Master of theoretical ecohydrology, Peter Eagleson (MIT). I learned from them about the interactions between hydrology and the climate. We looked at how different mathematical descriptions of the land surface in climate models affected land surface and climate memory. More “realistic” models that explicitly accounted for precipitation interception, i.e. by plant canopies, and its subsequent “fast” evaporation back to the atmosphere imparted less memory to the climate than traditional bucket models.

I moved to Arizona to work on more regional problems and learn how to collect data from the field from a wonderful mentor, David Goodrich (USDA-ARS). I was also fortunate enough to run into another Master, Jim Shuttleworth, who took me under his wing at the University of Arizona. I learned micrometeorology from him and started making my own measurements of land surface fluxes, ultimately shedding light on how riparian ecosystem water use, photosynthesis and respiration were influenced by how well the plants were tapped into groundwater.

A big technological development came along when I was a graduate student: low-power, fast-response gas analyzers coupled with low-power dataloggers that can store the data. Thank you Campbell Scientific and LiCor! This meant we could start making measurements where we don’t have line power and having gas analyzers that could measure both carbon dioxide and water vapor. The later meant I had to learn something about carbon dioxide fluxes, further cementing my ecohydrological interests.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
We are seeing new ways to partition measured evapotranspiration into its evaporation and transpiration sources. Combining this with the ton of available eddy covariance water and carbon fluxes like that from AmeriFlux allow us a whole new look into ecosystem-scale plant-water interactions, being able to see what the plants are doing separately.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
Noy-Meir, Imanuel. "Desert ecosystems: environment and producers." Annual review of ecology and systematics 4.1 (1973): 25-51.

The water limitation in desert environments really brings out the linkages between ecosystems and their hydrology. This paper highlights so many ecohydrological processes that we are still working to understand today. The great thing is that we now have the data to do that.

Huxman, Travis E., Keirith A. Snyder, David Tissue, A. Joshua Leffler, Kiona Ogle, William T. Pockman, Darren R. Sandquist, Daniel L. Potts, and Susan Schwinning. "Precipitation pulses and carbon fluxes in semiarid and arid ecosystems." Oecologia 141, no. 2 (2004): 254-268.

I have to laugh as I remember the first time I saw this work on a poster I thought to myself, “Is that all?” This is not the first time, my first impressions about a paper were wrong. Fifteen years later, I’ve probably cited this paper more than a hundred times. It does such a great job of synthesizing the literature on ecosystem metabolic responses to intermittent pulses of water, and it lays out some many new hypotheses that we’ve been trying to test ever since.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love rambling around outside whether that is on foot, wheels or skis. If there are mountains and a friend or two around, then I’m even happier.

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MEET A LEAF: RACHEL GABOR

10/7/2019

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Dr. Rachel Gabor is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. @RiverChem

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I like to think of water as the driving force behind how everything works in the natural world. Water shapes the landscape, determines habitats, acts as a solvent, transports particles and solutes, and is present in every living thing. Ecohydrology is focusing in on that relationship between water and life – how the presence, absence, and movement of water drives life, and how life uses and moves water.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.S. in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota, and an M.S. in Water Resources Engineering and Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from University of Colorado Boulder.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My undergrad degree was in chemistry, with a lot of math and physics, but I kept wavering on my major because I wanted to study everything. Near the end of college I learned about the existence of biogeochemistry and thought it was cool that there was this field that let you combine a bunch of different sciences, but assumed I’d missed my chance to major in it (my college had no classes in the earth/environmental sciences).

After my M.S. I joined an AmeriCorps program and spent several months in Louisiana and Mississippi doing Hurricane Katrina recovery work. It opened my eyes to how engineering decisions we make about our landscape and, more specifically, waterways, can end up having severe consequences for both ecosystems and people. I learned a lot that year and when it ended I decided to go find if there was some way I could use my science background to study water, the environment, and human-environment interactions. Turns out there was this entire field of science that did just that! As soon as I started taking classes in graduate school I realized that the hydrologic sciences was a perfect fit for me – I loved that I could use everything I learned in chemistry and math and physics and biology and integrate them into trying to understand how watersheds work. Lately I’ve been moving away from more natural systems and focusing my research on human-impacted systems, trying to get back to the human-environmental interactions that initially inspired me to go this route.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Urban systems. I think historically a lot of hydrology research focused on understanding everything possible in whatever cool “natural” catchment was nearby, and we learned a ton from that. But just in the 10 years I’ve been in this field I’ve seen more and more research focused on understanding urban systems. Urban ecohydrology takes all the complications of hydrology in a natural system and adds human engineering/infrastructure on top of it. Understanding it is a fantastically complicated interdisciplinary puzzle and one where you can really see the potential for your research to help people.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
I chose to get my PhD from an interdisciplinary environmental studies department in the hope that it would help me learn how my science could fit into larger society and decision-making. I went into my second semester loving everything I was learning but frustrated at what felt like a complete rift between science and policy. Then I read Kate Brauman’s The Nature and Value of Ecosystem Services: An Overview Highlighting Hydrologic Services and it completely opened up this whole new perspective for me. It was my first exposure to the idea of ecosystem services, and framed them through the lens of hydrology. I loved that there was a way to take all the things I valued as a scientist and someone who loved the natural world, and couch them in policy language.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I’m still working on finding that elusive early tenure-track work/life balance. I learned to play ice hockey in graduate school and still try to get on the ice when I can. I crochet (afghans, hats, scarves), usually while watching some science fiction tv show, and take my dog on regular walks/runs. I used to play board/card games frequently but have been having trouble finding people to play with since I moved to Ohio.

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MEET A LEAF: Giulia Vico

MEET A LEAF: MITCH PAVAO-ZUCKERMAN

MEET A LEAF: RUSS SCOTT

MEET A LEAF: RACHEL GABOR

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