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MEET A LEAF: ENRICO YEPEZ

11/26/2018

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Dr. Enrico A. Yépez is Profesor Investigador Titular “C” at Departamento de Ciencias del Agua y Medio Ambiente at Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora in Ciudad Obregón, México. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
This interdisciplinary science has been in the core of my research goals simply because I investigate ecosystem processes in water limited ecosystems. An early realization in my career was that for life, and any biogeochemical cycle, to occur in these systems, water is needed. So, the aim of finding the “functional fate of rainfall” has been central in my thinking and has given me the basis to link hydrological processes with ecosystem production. Ecohydrology also provides knowledge to manage water resources and preserve ecosystems, which are themes that are very relevant in Northwestern Mexico where water is certainly scarce.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I obtained a degree in Biology from the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico where I was trained in plant physiological ecology (cacti research). Then I moved to Tucson to get my MS and PhD in Rangeland Management with a minor in Global Change at the University of Arizona (2006). Here is where  I succumbed to study seasonally dry ecosystems.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
In my graduate work I was confronted with a very fundamental issue in ecohydrology: How can we partition the evapotranspiration flux into its components without losing coherence to study processes at the ecosystem scale? This simple, yet fundamental, question obligated me to think about soil, plant and atmospheric processed combined and exposed me to modern technology (flux towers, IRGAs, elemental analyzers and mass spects) to trace the water molecule in ecosystems. Thinking about ET in separated terms demands inquiring how is the biology influencing this physical driven flux and what are the consequences for ecosystem production if water moves through the physical or the biological path.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
There is still room for finding fine connections between the water cycle and other ecosystem processes. For instance, modelling highly dynamic water and carbon fluxes in pulse driven and seasonally dry ecosystems is still very challenging and it is an area that requires profound ecohydrological criteria. I must mention as well that as water scarcity and pollution augments in the planet ecohydrological knowledge should now confront water management issues.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
An ecological paper that transmitted an important hydrological message early in my career was the Laureroth and Sala 1992 (DOI: 10.2307/1941874), where the relationship between rainfall and ecosystem production was highlighted but specially how the space by time substitutions are useful to study and integrate ecohydrological processes, an idea that was later on explored by Huxman et al 2004 (DOI:10.1038/nature02561) with a more explicit argument on how this relationship and the space by time substitution is indeed useful to make synthesis and compare ecosystem processes across ecosystems. As nicely depicted by Biederman et al 2016 (doi: 10.1111/gcb.13222) this is an idea that is worth exploiting as we study ecosystem processes nowadays.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy dealing with the analytical instrumentation in lab; I love to see the machines beeping and LEDs blinking while data comes out; I particularly enjoy opening their guts to see how they work. I still try to go out to the field with my students, but when I go home to be with my wife and our two kids (Tlaloc and Ehecatl a.k.a. the Monsoons), card games after a fine Sonoran steak and red wine are usually in order.
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MEET A LEAF: HOLLY BARNARD

11/19/2018

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Dr. Holly Barnard is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Department of Geography at the University of Colorado – Boulder.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me ecohydrology means “interdisciplinary” research in the most synergistic meaning of the word – where investigating a problem or a curiosity with approaches from multiple fields results in findings that advance our understanding of the greater system. Not every study I pursue matches this ideology, sometimes the advancement is more in one field than the other, but it is a goal to strive for.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Forestry, forestry, forestry! I have B.S. in Forest Resources from the University of Washington, an M.S. in Forest Science from Colorado State University, and dual degree Ph.D. in Forest Engineering and Forest Science from Oregon State University. Um, yeah, I like trees (and water) and at one time I was pretty good at axe throwing.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As an undergrad, I worked in Tom Hinckley’s water relations tree physiology lab and then pursued that research area for my master’s.  After my master’s, I worked in environmental consulting where I did a lot of groundwater and surface water sampling. When I decided to go back to school for my Ph.D. and was presented with ecohydrology as a research option, it was a natural fit and extension of my past experience.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I feel that scaling in ecohydrology is a persistent conundrum: when, where, and why (or not) are the ecohydro interactions we observe at the plant, plot or hillslope scale important for processes at the catchment, landscape or global scales? Issues of scale in spatial-temporal data are compounded due to the highly multi-scale nature of ecologic and hydrologic processes. One can argue that all smaller scale processes are important (the small catchment scale and below is where my personal interests lie), but what needs to be included in larger scale, bi-directional models to avoid misrepresentation of either the ecology or the hydrology? Maybe this isn’t an emerging area, but it is certainly a grand challenge.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Dawson and Ehleringer 1991: Streamside trees that don’t use stream water
It has is all: streams, trees, mystery, intrigue, and isotopes - all in an elegantly simple study that offers surprises and drives complex questions about the interactions among vegetation, soil moisture, groundwater and surface water. Ecohydrology well before its time. I love this paper.

Newman et al. 2006: Ecohydrology of water‐limited environments: A scientific vision
Early in my Ph.D. I felt like ecohydrology wasn’t a true discipline, but simply that the two fields weren’t reading each other’s literature. This paper provided such a clear articulation of ecohydrology as its own discipline and the grand challenges put forward really helped to guide my thinking in how ecohydrology can be greater than sum of its parts.

In terms of social-media publications, I’m a fan of The Egohydrologist on Twitter.  Their tweets have higher impact factors any of your papers (or so they say).


What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I’m a Boulder stereo-type for outdoor recreation.  I enjoy climbing, road biking, skiing and deadlifting.  I’m also very happy laying on the couch with several pets and watching football. My partner and I enjoy going to the plays at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. 
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MEET A LEaF: SALLY THOMPSON

11/12/2018

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:Dr. Sally Thompson is currently an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California Berkeley…however, she is soon to move "home" to become an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Western Australia.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As a definition, life influences the water cycle, and the water cycle in turn influences life.  Put those feedbacks together and you have a complex dynamic system which will create surprising and intricate behavior that is both fascinating to learn about, and important for the world.  Yay – ecohydrology is so much fun!

On a more personal level, I got into ecohydrology because of the change in hydrology in the Western Australian landscape (my home!) that occurred after native vegetation was cleared for agriculture.  Crops used less water than Australian native plants, and recharge increased, bringing deep and saline groundwater close to the land surface.  This so called “dryland salinity” is now a major threat to agriculture, ecosystems, water systems, infrastructure and even human physical and mental health.  It used to break my heart to see the bushlands I love deterioriating as salt poisoned them.  For me, ecohydrology remains personally tied to the exciting idea of solving this problem by strategically planting trees to restore the pre-clearing hydrology without compromising farmer livelihoods – a fundamentally ecohydrological problem of landscape engineering with vegetation… a hard, fascinating, important problem.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Undergraduate degrees in Environmental Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, from University of Western Australia. 

A PhD in Environmental Science, from Duke.  Hat tip to the wonderful Gaby Katul for being the best research adviser ever.  Seriously, do your PhD with Gaby!


How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I was really emotionally engaged with the dryland salinity problem I mentioned above, and did my senior thesis on this topic.  I found the notion that we could manipulate vegetation deliberately at landscape scales to address environmental challenges to be tremendously exciting – I still do!  This seemed like real ecological engineering to me (apologies to those who consider ecological engineering to involve manipulating communities of microbes).  I then moved into thinking more about desertification and the links between vegetation spatial distributions and overland flow in drylands – a topic my group still works on today.  Other topics – from stomata to landscape scales – followed thick and fast.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think the links between ecohydrology and critical zone science are fascinating and will likely blossom in the next decade or two, as the critical zone concept becomes ever more established as a way to integrate disciplines in a common physical zone.  The importance of the subsurface (at a minimum in terms of how it stores and transmits water) for plant health and physiology is in some ways obvious – yet strangely often neglected in ecophysiological studies.  Similarly, this implies that plants will respond in interesting ways to different subsurface environments, meaning that if we could look critically at what plants are doing, we might be able to get large-scale insights into hard-to-observe features of the subsurface at management relevant scales. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really do love and retain a very soft spot for the work Kelly Caylor, Todd Scanlon and Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe did on vegetaion spatial organization in river basins in the early 21st Century – e.g. their GRL paper "Feasible optimality of vegetation patterns in river basins." (Geophysical Research Letters 31, no. 13 (2004)) is a little gem.  I was reading this and related papers as I was applying to grad school and I got very excited about the ideas.  I also was convinced at the time that Kelly Caylor was a woman (who, in my pre-doctoral mind, was going to be a tremendous role model for me!), and I have never truly forgiven him for turning out to be otherwise (Kelly, is of course a great role model, his disappointing gender nonwithstanding.)   

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have two very young kids, so mostly for fun I daydream about the fun things I would do if I wasn’t changing diapers, wiping noses and crawling around the floor pretending to be a cat.  Those things include learning to stand up paddleboard, joining a choir, swimming 3 times a week, going snorkeling with whale sharks, going up in a hot air balloon, visiting the South Pacific Islands, and, of course, the ever popular “sleeping for eight uninterrupted hours in a night”.  One day I hope to do at least some of these fun things.  For now, my cat impersonation is pretty much the highlight.
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MEET A LEAF: BRAD WILCOX

11/5/2018

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Dr. Bradford Wilcox is the Sid Kyle Endowed Professor in Arid and Semi-Arid Land Ecohydrology in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Texas A&M University where he is also Director of the Wilcox Ecohydrology Lab.
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What does Ecohydrology mean to you?
As others have noted previous posts, ecohydrology is the science of interactions of between biota and water. My own interest centers on how plants—particularly trees—influence the water cycle at multiple scales.  I have always seen ecohydrology very much as an applied science, and one that focuses on understanding the implications of environmental change for the water cycle. 
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.S. in Rangeland Ecology from Texas Tech University.  It was there that I developed a fascination and a passion for how plants and soils interact in semiarid landscapes.  I went on to earn an M.S. from Texas Tech University as well, also in range science, which afforded me the opportunity to live in Peru for 13 months studying soils and ecological communities in the high Andes. My Ph.D. is from New Mexico State University, also in what was then called watershed management, where my research focused on understanding how grazing alters runoff and erosion on steep semiarid landscapes.
 
How did you arrive at working in and thinking about ecohydrology?  
Early in my career, the term ecohydrology was not part of the popular scientific vernacular.  My research interests were not appreciably different than they are now. I self-identified as a rangeland hydrologist.  It was the seminal paper by Ignacio Rodriquez- Iturbe in 2000 that really changed everything.  I am simplifying, but in that paper he made a clarion call to the hydrology community that plants are really important to the water cycle and there is much that we do not understand about how plants modify water fluxes at multiple temporal and spatial scales.  Hearing this from such an eminent hydrologist was extremely exciting because he was essentially saying that what I was interested in was really important and at the cutting edge of a new and exciting emerging discipline—ecohydrology!  Soon after that, Brent Newman and I organized our first AGU Chapman conference (2002) focusing on the ecohydrology of drylands.  The conference was a success in many aspects, but in particular it was a landmark event in terms of bringing together ecologists and hydrologists with similar interests and facilitating cross-disciplinary interactions and communications. 
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I have always viewed ecohydrology as an applied science that can provide insights into many of the seemingly intractable environmental challenges we are currently facing.  It is urgent that we address these challenges, but doing so will require more interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration—particularly in regard to doing a better job of understanding the human factors that are driving global change.  Collaboration with those far outside our discipline, such as social scientists, is hard (and not always productive in terms of how we are evaluated as scientists)—but I believe it is vital if we are going to have a real impact on problems that are important to people.
 
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?
Again I return to the “pre-ecohydrology era” during my formative years as a scientist.  The late 1980s and 1990s was an introspective period for the discipline of hydrology, and for me was an exciting time.  One set of papers in particular had a profound influence on me.  In 1986, Water Resources Research published a special issue: Trends and Directions in Hydrology, edited by Steve Burges. In that issue were a number of landmark papers, but in particular I recall the paper by J.C.I. Dooge, Looking for Hydrologic Laws, and another by V. Klemes, Dilettantism in Hydrology: Transition or Destiny?. Both papers, I believe, were making the argument that the science of hydrology had tilted too much toward engineering and needed to readjust to become a true earth science; AND that there were some exciting things to discover—one only had to look!
 
What do you do for fun?
I have more leisure time now that my three daughters are grown and I am trying to make the most of it.  This summer I spent 4 weeks on an “epic” camping adventure across the western USA with two grandsons. My current passions—besides ecohydrology—are road cycling and fly fishing. I love traveling even if most of it is related to work, and in particular I enjoy traveling and working in Latin America. I also spend quite a bit of time working to improve my Spanish and Portuguese.  
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