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MEET A LEAF: Paul Brooks

4/22/2019

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​Paul Brooks is a Professor of Hydrology and Biogeochemistry in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Utah. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Previous answers to this question do a wonderful job of describing the diversity of topics and modes of inquiry that encompass ecohydrology. Building on this theme, I’ll suggest that ecohydrology is more than a (newish) discipline, it is an approach to understanding the environment that explicitly recognizes the fundamental importance of how water availability and movement influence life and how life influences the movement and availability of water. We learn in primary school how the molecular structure of water results in unique thermodynamic, chemical, fluid, and solid properties which together constrain climate, allow the reactions of life to occur, yet simultaneously provide limits on growth rate and form. Because life has evolved within the constraints imposed by these properties (not only availability) of water, examining systems within the context of the diverse interactions between life and water properties provides a powerful window to understand ecosystem/ environmental structure and response to disturbance. Consequently, an ecohydrological approach integrates perspectives from individual disciplines ranging from plant physiology to hydrometeorology and community ecology to hydrogeology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
BS in Biology and Chemistry from Florida State University, MS in Ecohydrology from CU Boulder, and PhD in Biogeochemistry from CU Boulder.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Early in my career I was focused on the intersection between toxicology and contaminant transport, specifically tasked with developing and validating a predictive model of contaminant exposure from leaking storage tanks and waste facilities. After instrumenting a large alluvial plain with nested piezometers, I was surprised to find that local hydrologic head gradients indicated high spatial variability in flowpath rates and directions at sub-kilometer scales, while larger scales exhibited gradients and flowpaths more typically associated with gaining or losing stream reaches. Principal component analyses of vegetation communities reflected these smaller-scale patterns providing a quick, nondestructive approach for identifying subsurface flowpaths. Although my subsequent research focused primarily on biogeochemistry, these findings percolated in the back of my mind until Jim Shuttleworth encouraged me to join an effort focused on the question “What are the effects of vegetation change on basin-scale water balance?” as part of the SAHRA Science and Technology Center. This long term effort provided the opportunity to integrate my interests in biogeochemistry, ecology, and hydrology and has been influential in guiding my work over the last decade.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I see three priorities for ecohydrology. 1) As the discipline matures our community needs to maintain the disruptive culture that encourages broad collaboration and innovation spurred by new ideas from related fields. 2) We need to translate the notable progress within ecohydrology to stakeholders, including both other disciplines and decision makers. 3) In research, we need to expand our understanding of how vegetation connects both water and carbon fluxes between the deeper subsurface to the overlying atmosphere. This includes improved understanding of deeper hydrologic flowpaths and water stores, and the influence of vegetation structure and activity on boundary layer radiant and turbulent fluxes.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’m constantly finding “new” or revisiting “old” favorite papers including many of the classic publications mentioned by previous respondents. If I had to choose one ecohydrology paper, I think it would be Horton, 1933: The Role of infiltration in the hydrologic cycle. Although widely cited by hydrologists for insights into infiltration and rainfall-runoff processes, the analyses in this paper led Horton to infer that “the natural vegetation of a region tends to develop to such an extent that it can utilize the largest possible portion of available…effective rainfall.” This inference placed ecological processes (e.g. adaptation, acclimation, assembly, phenology) as the bridge linking energy-water coupling at the land surface (vertical fluxes) with catchment-scale hydrological processes that control streamflow generation (lateral fluxes). Further, this paper identified a readily available metric to estimate the ratio of ET to plant available water over large regions thereby providing an independent check on efforts to upscale data from individual plots instrumented for sap flow and/or eddy covariance. Beyond ecohydrology, I require my students to read Chamberlin 1890, Platt 1964, Klemes 1986, and others to help stay grounded in the methodology of science.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Many of my hobbies involve a range of human-powered sports and recreation in, on, or under water, both liquid and frozen. Cycling, trail running, hiking, and climbing round out activities away from water. Ideally, these pursuits are followed by the consumption good food and fermented beverages with friends. Although I rarely find the time, I also enjoy the immediate (relative to research) gratification associated with carpentry, remodeling, gardening, vehicle repair, etc.
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MEET A LEAF: Lauren McPhillips

4/1/2019

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Dr. Lauren McPhillips is an Assistant Professor co-appointed in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Penn State University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?

When I worked for USGS for a bit, I was part of a group that considered themselves the ‘hydroecology’ lab, where we focused more on biogeochemistry of aquatic systems. Around that time, ‘ecohydrology’ as a discipline was starting to grow, but seemed to be more focused on water-vegetation feedbacks. I personally see it as encompassing both of those things- cycling of water within ecological systems, including biologically-mediated exchange and transformation of material within this ecohydrological system.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
BS, Science of Earth Systems and MS & PhD, Biological and Environmental Engineering … all from Cornell.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I think it really started at USGS when I was thinking a lot about biogeochemistry in aquatic systems, and then got amplified in grad school as I got interested in hydrologic influences on microbially-mediated processes in the landscape, like denitrification. Maybe I hang out with ecologists too much, but in general I think it’s hard to separate out hydrology from the greater ecological system of which it’s a part.  

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m biased, but I’d say ecohydrology of urban systems. There’s increasing interest in using more nature-based solutions or green infrastructure to manage stormwater and heat in cities (among providing other benefits) and so we need a better understanding more than ever of all the ecohydrological feedbacks of various designs or strategies. Related to this, there’s also opportunities to better connect to the ecological engineering community, in leveraging and applying some of this knowledge.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It’s of course hard to pick one favorite, but I’ll just pick one paper I’ve been thinking about lately- Pataki et al., 2011. I did my postdoc work in Tempe, AZ and so have been learning about and thinking a lot about arid ecohydrology, especially in the context of urbanization. This commentary paper led by Diane Pataki provides a nice overview of the important ecohydrologic considerations and complexities in these arid urban systems and also brings in a sociohydrology element as well, thinking about feedbacks with people.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Cooking, baking, biking, and paddling (though most of my adventures lately are admittedly mostly limited to running around playgrounds with my young kids). I have actually managed to merge my loves of baking, eating, and ecohydrology by making a cake of my PhD work after I defended. It showcased the suburban landscape (complete with detention basin and grassed swales) where I investigated hydro-biogeochemical feedbacks.  
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MEET A LEAF: Shishir Basant

3/25/2019

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Shishir Basant is a PhD candidate working with Dr. Brad Wilcox in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Texas A&M University. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I still treat hydrology as a reference point to understand the importance of ecohydrology. And that’s what ecohydrology is to me – expanding our understanding of hydrology by taking into account the biophysical processes in a system. To me, personally, being an ecohydrologist (as opposed to a hydrologist) has allowed me to see the relevance of what we do beyond water resources to other implications such as carbon balance and system stability.     

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in mechanical engineering which I acquired from the National Institute of Technology Nagpur (India) in 2009. I moved to US (and Texas A&M University) in 2014 to pursue a masters in hydrology. I started working on my PhD with my adviser Brad Wilcox a year after that.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
In the year preceding to moving to Texas A&M as a graduate student, I was working as a fellow with a grass roots organization in Central Himalayas in India. During this time, I was involved with their project on aquifer mapping and catchment delineation while engaging the community in a participatory manner. This unique experience motivated me to pursue graduate school in the area of hydrology. However, my introduction to ecohydrology was through a course which gave me the opportunity to view vegetation as part of the hydrological systems. Specifically, I was excited by the work related to shrub encroachment and streamflow dynamics in Central Texas by Brad Wilcox in whose lab I have been working as a graduate student since 2015. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I have always been interested in the narrative of planting trees for carbon gain and climate change mitigation. The concerns related to tree plantation programs have been especially raised in works such as those by Dr. Rob Jackson, Dr. Esteban Jobaggy and Dr. Joseph Veldman. However, this idea that “tree planting and creating forests is good” has continued to persist in the society at large. I think that as a discipline ecohydrology is probably most well placed to correct such misconceptions. How can we break down the advancements we make as ecohydrologists to something which can take the place of some of these misconceptions and help correct some of these dominant narratives? Working closely with social and political scientists could give us some answers and could also be one of the emerging areas. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
In my PhD so far I have spent a lot of time characterizing soil moisture heterogeneity in a shrubland and in trying to understand how it may be linked with vegetation. In this regard, a favorite would be Breshears and Barnes (1999) where they introduce a four-compartment soil moisture model to illustrate the interdependency between plant functional types and soil moisture. Even though a very simple idea, the framework helped me think about heterogeneities at the grassland-forest continuum in semiarid systems. I was also very excited to see the paper by Stocker et al. (2018) last year which showed the role of soil moisture droughts in subduing light use efficiency. 
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Apart from sifting through my data and literature, I enjoy sketching, gardening, cooking and playing soccer. I also like to keep up with my interests in history and political ecology when I can.   
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MEET A LEAF: Mauricio E. Arias

3/18/2019

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Dr. Mauricio E. Arias is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
Website: watershedsustainability.org
Twitter: @WaSusResearch
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I like to think of Ecohydrology in a broad interdisciplinary sense: it is the field that seeks to understand the interactions and feedbacks between the hydrological cycle and ecological processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate and master’s degrees where in environmental engineering sciences from the University of Florida, and my PhD was in Civil and Natural Resources Engineering from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The first time I heard of ecohydrology was during my masters at UF, when myself and most of my colleagues at the Center for Wetlands were working with constructed wetlands, systems in which the good understanding of ecohydrological processes is a key factor in design and management. I then became interested (ok, obsessed) with how large-scale hydrology affects wetland vegetation. When I had the chance to develop my PhD dissertation in the Mekong River and visited the Tonle Sap wetland in Cambodia, I was certain that was going to be the core of my PhD journey.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
One important area that still needs much work is the integration of ecohydrology processes with hydrological modeling. Most hydrological models, in particular watershed-scale models commonly used by water resources researchers and practitioners, make faulty assumptions related to land cover dynamics (or lack thereof), surface-driven rainfall-runoff responses, and potential evapotranspiration. There has been much progress in describing these processes at the plot scale, but how to effectively propagate them to a scale that is meaningful to regional water and natural resources managers is something where I foresee much research being needed.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Foti, R., del Jesus, M., Rinaldo, A., Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., 2012. Hydroperiod regime controls the organization of plant species in wetlands. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 19596–19600.
This paper described how inundation patterns driven by rainfall seasonality throughout the Everglades where responsible for the spatial distribution of wetland vegetation communities. I was especially fond of this paper because it was published right when I was in the middle of my PhD studying a wetland system of similar dimension, but for which I ended up using a different approach to deal with the limited data collected before my time in Cambodia.
  
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I do not get to spend as much time in the water at work as I would like, but I am fortunate to live by the beautiful Hillsborough River that meanders through Tampa. I love kayaking early in the morning or watching the sunset in the canoe with my son and wife.
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MEET A LEAF: DAVE BRESHEARS

3/11/2019

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​Dr. David D. Breshears ("Dave") is a Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, jointly affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Ecological Society of America.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JQOZ4cUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Twitter: @DaveBreshears   
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
As almost everyone else in this series has noted, ecohydrology is about the intersection and interactions between ecology and hydrology.  However, being affiliated with a watershed management group at the time that we were preparing to launch the journal Ecohydrology, I was challenged to defend how this really differed from watershed management, which had for decades considered both ecology and hydrology.  I think there are three criteria that, if not distinct from watershed management, represent areas of focus that have historically not been considered in depth by it.  First, historic use of the water balance equation usually results in aggregation of evaporation from plant foliage, evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants, yet these together dominate the water budget and need to be disaggregated to better understand and manage ecosystems and watersheds. Developments in flux towers and stable isotopes over the past couple of decades have changed the game in addressing these areas.  Second, feedbacks are really critical, whether they relate to runoff redistribution, to vegetation cover modifying soil evaporation, or broad-scale vegetation change impacting local and distant climate.  These were previously challenging to evaluate, and to some degree remain so, but are readily modeled such that different aspects of the predictions can now be evaluated.  We emphasized these feedbacks when we defined the scope of the journal Ecohydrology.  And third, as highlighted by Rodríguez-Iturbe in his classic 2000 paper, soil moisture is a key integrator, which contrasts with the primary focus of watershed management on overland flow, streamflow and groundwater recharge.  The three criteria listed are critical ones to study if we are to effectively address the challenges associated with rapid change in climate and land use.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I first got interested in ecology looking at illustrated diagrams of food webs and energy flow in high school, so then went to New Mexico State University to get a B.S. in Agriculture through the Wildlife Science program, moving more from organisms to ecosystems as I progressed.  After a couple of summers of University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, I decided to go to graduate school at Colorado State University, where I could simultaneously study how to use radiotracers in the environment and work on applied problems related to contaminants, working with Ward Whicker—an international leader in radioecology. I worked on modeling how contaminants released during 1960s weapons testing were transported through agroecosystems for my M.S.  I wanted a more ecological focus for my PhD and Colorado State also had a broad Program in Ecological Studies that I completed. I had the opportunity to go back to Los Alamos, NM, where I grew up, to work at Los Alamos National Lab (then run by University of California) on water balance issues in a semiarid piñon-juniper woodland as a way to consider longer-term issues that might influence adjacent landfill covers that would likely go through succession to also become woodlands.  I learned a great lesson when committee member Bill Lauenroth challenged me in my oral exam to explain why shortgrass steppe around Fort Collins and semiarid woodland around Los Alamos both had the same precipitation but different vegetation—an exam question I fell flat on (short answer: precipitation event size distribution is related to soil moisture depth distribution, which is related to plant life form). I spent the next three months mostly reading and that really reframed my thinking about semiarid ecosystems.    

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology? 
So, while working on issues of water balance in these semiarid woodlands, and collaborating with Brad Wilcox on runoff redistribution (among other topics), Brad came running down to my office to talk about the 2000 Rodríguez-Iturbe paper in Water Resources Research that so many others in this series have mentioned.  He, Brent Newman and Osvaldo Sala then went on to co-organize the first Chapman Conference in ecohydrology, which I helped with.  I was still worried about becoming established as an ecologist so had some reservation about becoming too affiliated with something that ended in "hydrology", as I shared in this essay.  Nonetheless, it served as a great framework for thinking about how semiarid systems worked. During that time, I was fortunate to have Ecohydrology Leaves founder Shirley Papuga as an undergraduate research student to work with. Additionally, colleague Craig Allen of Bandelier National Monument shared his research insights and invited me to work with him on drought-related tree mortality, and I have been working on that ever since, recently highlighted here.  At first I did not really associate tree mortality with being an ecohydrological problem, but it in fact largely is.  And tree die-off is becoming so extensive—for example recent California tree mortality approaches 150 million trees—that I am now working with a team that includes Abby Swann of University of Washington, who leads the modeling, on "ecoclimate teleconnections", where we estimate how the effects of complete tree loss in one region affect climate and vegetation (including crops) in others.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The most fundamental challenge we have as a society is to make rapid reductions in emissions fast enough to try to hit the goals spelled out in the IPCC Special Report on 1.5oC.  Both ecohydrology and my particular focus on drought- and heat-related tree die-off are deeply intertwined with this issue.  Most countries include afforestation (adding trees) as a major part of their plan for addressing goals of the Paris Accord.  Ongoing widespread woody plant encroachment, as studied by Steve Archer, also contributes to terrestrial carbon gains.  But at the same time, extensive deforestation must be dramatically reduced.  And the most complicated aspects of the challenge are twofold.  First, we are counting on increased tree biomass to slow the warming, but while we are warming, the probability of wildfire and of tree die-off (directly from drought or in association with pests and pathogens) are both increasing rapidly. Tree sensitivity to heat waves may make this situation even worse. Second, our research on ecoclimate teleconnections is suggesting extensive tree loss in one region can alter the plant productivity elsewhere in the same country or in another one, in some cases increasing it and in some cases decreasing it. This has profound implications for us as we attempt globally coordinated carbon management.  Understanding ecohydrological processes and feedbacks are key to helping us address the greatest challenge of our time and one of humanity's greatest challenges ever.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain. 
This is such a hard question, because there are so many great ones out there. I think the single best example of ecohydrology is the small, often overlooked, 1996 book by Ludwig, Tongway and others, "Landscape Ecology, Function and Management: Principles from Australia's Rangelands", because it does it all: develops a conceptual framework that is explicit and clear in terms of ecohydrological feedbacks, and then goes on to support it, model it, and provide monitoring and management guidance.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)? 
I enjoy spending time with my family, including my adult sons and their girlfriends; listening to rock, jazz and some classical on vinyl records on a great stereo at home; going to concerts; watching University of Arizona basketball, visiting the rocky Oregon coast; reading novels and poetry; and traveling.
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MEET A lEAF: Zulia Mayari Sanchez Mejia

3/4/2019

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Dr. Zulia Mayari Sanchez Mejia is an Associate Professor in the Water Science and Environment Department at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora (ITSON) in Sonora, Mexico.
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​What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me ecohydrology means beyond love.  I’ve heard this as a joke in a class or maybe it was in a couple of different courses...when the teacher was trying to motivate us and getting started to talk about fluxes...he/she asked "what is the energy that moves the world?" and suddenly he/she would say "and it's not love".  I guess it’s stuck with me, since I now tell that joke just when I’m about to start talking about the movement of water and energy, and start with examples from a very systematic view of fluxes and reservoirs. So...for me, ecohydrology can be the flux of matter, water and energy from one box to another, where the boxes are the components of our ecosystem, and where we can study the fluxes with various approaches. But it’s also love for science, working together, and appreciation of diverse thinking.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I graduated from the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara as an Environmental Biotechnology Engineer. I received my masters degree in Natural Resources at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora and my doctoral degree from the University of Arizona in Ecohydrology and Watershed Management.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I didn’t really hear of ecohydrology until my master’s studies. The most attractive part of it was the field work. As an undergrad we did quite a lot of field work: collecting plants and fungus, observing fauna, and describing the ecosystem. But, it was not until my masters that I got to learn about all of the equipment one can have in an ecosystem to actually understand processes, and it all spread from there. We went on a trip to collect precipitation data from Mazatlan to Santiago Papasquiaro; from this I got a sense of spatial scale. By the time I got to the Papuga Lab for my PhD I had so many questions and ended up with even more!  I thought I was only going to work in the desert but found much more in courses and by helping my mates with their fieldwork.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am a little biased, but I think ecohydrology of coastal systems has many opportunity areas. Usually I think about soil moisture and vapor pressure deficit as main drivers of ecosystem processes, but suddenly when working in coastal systems soil moisture is not a limiting factor. In fact, the seagrasses that I’m working with are submerged in a matrix of water so the gas exchange is happening between the plant and the water column. Land surface-atmosphere models lack a good representation of coastal ecosystems. And coastal ecosystems are so important since they connect the continents with the oceans. So, I think the community will be paying more attention to these topics in the future.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
It would be Charney (1975).  Finally after what felt probably like 100 times of reading it, I actually understood albedo.  I also understood connectivity between the land surface and the atmosphere. For me albedo is such a simple and beautiful concept.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
On the weekends Chris and usually make chilaquiles. I read latino-american literature. We watch movies, visit family, hike, or try a new restaurant.  We love to eat so, we cook a lot. 
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MEET A LEAF: GABRIELE mANOLI

2/25/2019

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Dr. Gabriele Manoli is a Branco Weiss Fellow holding a postdoc position at ETH Zürich (transitioning to a lecturer position at University College London).
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
The term ecohydrology clearly recalls a combination of the words “ecology” and “hydrology” to describe “an interdisciplinary field studying the interactions between water and ecosystems”. This definition, however, is somewhat reductive – especially if the word “interdisciplinary” does not receive the attention it deserves. To me ecohydrology really means bridging disciplines and scales to study the complex interactions regulating mass and energy exchanges within the biosphere (i.e. our “house”, as the term “eco” recalls). This makes ecohydrology an exciting quest for understanding, following water in its countless interactions with Earth (its surface, subsurface, and atmosphere) and Life (plants, bacteria, humans – you name it!). This knowledge provides unique tools to understand global change and guide a sustainable management of natural resources.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I obtained both my BSc and MSc degrees in Environmental Engineering (University of Padova and Technical University of Denmark). I have a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Padova (Italy).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Everything started with the Richards equation! One of the tasks during my PhD was the implementation of a root water uptake module in the catchment-scale hydrological model CATHY. From a “mathematical” perspective, root water uptake is just a sink term in the Richards equation - but in reality, it is much more than that! Under the guidance of my advisor, Mario Putti, I visited Duke University where, together with Gabriel Katul, Marco Marani, Jean-Christophe Domec, and Sara Bonetti, I worked on modeling soil-plant processes, combining numerical methods with concepts of plant hydraulics, plant physiology, and land-atmosphere interactions. Suddenly, I was working on ecohydrology!

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
We are in a phase of rapid global changes, our planet is becoming increasingly urbanized, and human activities now rival the geophysical processes that shaped Earth. In this regard, the emerging area of “urban ecohydrology” offers a novel perspective on coupled human-natural systems. Cities are hot-spots for innovation but they also drive a loss of ecosystem services at multiple scales. The knowledge and approaches of ecohydrology are essential to describe such complex interactions between urban and natural ecosystems, offering new tools for planning and retrofitting of cities.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Picking one paper is quite difficult but I’d like to mention the review by Gabriel Katul and coauthors, “Evapotranspiration: a process driving mass transport and energy exchange in the soil‐plant‐atmosphere‐climate system”, Reviews of Geophysics, 2012, 50(3). Focusing on evapotranspiration, this paper provides a fantastic overview of the processes, scales, and feedbacks regulating water, carbon, and energy fluxes at the land surface, from leaf-scale processes to boundary-layer dynamics and the global water cycle.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy art and nature, good food and good company.
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MEET A LEAF: KELLY CAYLOR

2/18/2019

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Dr. Kelly Caylor is the Director of the Earth Research Institute and is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Bren School of Environmental Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. Twitter: @kcaylor
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
The definition of ecohydrology, which I will not attempt, is separate from its meaning to me. For me, ecohydrology meant - and still means - a personal pathway forward in the sciences. During my PhD work, I was a small part of a massive field campaign. Everywhere I looked someone was doing something I was interested in way better than I could ever hope to. It was deflating.  But I continued to dutifully count and map my savanna trees hoping I’d figure out what I was “really working on”. I also spent a fair amount of time sitting under some of these same trees questioning my decision-making and wondering if there was any University I could transfer to where you could get a PhD in tree counting. At some point, I had the realization that my new-found interest in “figuring out what the hell was going on, under savanna tree canopies” could just be re-packaged as “figuring out what the hell was going on under savanna tree canopies”. I got back from the field and threw myself into the study of spatial patterns, surface hydrology, and vegetation ecology. In ecohydrology, I had found an intellectual crack into which I could throw down roots.  

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Both my undergraduate and graduate degrees are from the University of Virginia, in Environmental Science.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The most formative experience in my professional life was the seminar that Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe gave at the University of Virginia when I was about two years from finishing my PhD. At that time, Ignacio was working with Francesco Laio, Luca Ridolfi, and Amilcare Porporato on a four-part series of classic papers that would appear in Advances in Water Resources in 2001. Ignacio’s seminar was like a lightning bolt: It was intensely illuminating, awesome in its power, and… it was very loud. I barged into his scheduled meeting with my PhD Advisor, Hank Shugart, and essentially demanded to know what sort of wizard he was that had - sight unseen - turned all of my notebook doodles and sketches into analytical solutions of stochastic differential equations. He generously invited me to collaborate with him and later - despite his otherwise good judgement - offered me a postdoc. Most importantly he has been a good friend, dear colleague, and outstanding mentor for almost two decades.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
What initially drew me to ecohydrology was the opportunity to marry the technical and empirical depth derived from hydrological sciences with the beauty and elegance of ecological theory and experimentation. I still think that sort of work is critical to fueling our intellectual minds and my desire for better questions still outweighs my interest in better answers. But I have also become increasingly interested in the application of ecohydrological approaches to solving problems with both immediacy and specificity. There are many excellent areas emerging in ecohydrology related to responses of organisms and ecosystems to climate change, applications to landscape and species conservation, and linkages to preserving critical ecohydrological services. These areas are increasingly able to make direct contributions to the sustainable management of our landscapes, and I can’t think of anything more important than that.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Picking favorites is hard, and I’m reluctant to do so. But I will say that the work of Dave Breshears has always been important to me (see example here). Effective scientific communication (and here I am speaking of research articles, not tweets) is extremely difficult, particularly when working across disciplines. I hammer the importance of writing well to all of my students. Unfortunately, my efforts lack consistency in this regard, but I can pick up almost any paper of Dave’s and use it as a teaching tool for what works in a field where it’s easy to fall into bad habits.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy hiking and camping a great deal. Cooking is fun enough for me that I once taught an undergraduate “science of food” course with a chef.  I would also say I enjoy gardening, but in Santa Barbara that is essentially applied ecohydrology, so I can’t include it.  I find that academics (at least this one) are pretty good at handling delayed gratification and I am usually in the middle of two or three projects related to boat building, car restoration, or some other decadal-scale activity.
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MEET A LEAF: AMY HANSEN

2/11/2019

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Dr. Amy Hansen is an Assistant Professor in the ​Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Kansas.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I think of ecohydrology as the study of the interdependence of ecological and hydrological processes. Ecohydrolology accounts for some of the most common feedbacks in a natural system. For example, aquatic plants obstruct the movement of water in streams yet the movement of water also regulates plant growth by changing the supply of nutrients and, in turbid waters, the available light. I really enjoy thinking about positive and negative feedbacks between ecological and hydrological systems and how those might be either dampening or amplifying an external change that is imposed on the overall system.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
As an undergraduate, I wanted to design cars to go faster (yeah, I know). To that end, my undergraduate degree is in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech and my Master’s degree is in Mechanical Engineering from University of Michigan. After 7 years of working in industry, a year-long road trip around the USA and 2.5 years in Peace Corps, I had something of an epiphany regarding how I wanted to use my time and energy and changed direction from the mysteries of the internal combustion engine towards a much more complicated topic; the mysteries of the natural environment. Subsequently, my PhD is in Civil Engineering with an Ecology minor from University of Minnesota, advised by Jacques Finlay in Ecology and Miki Hondzo in Civil Engineering.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Just before beginning my doctorate program, I was living in Honduras as a U.S. Peace Corp volunteer. In this role, I worked with rural community drinking water organizations who were interested in improving the quality of their water and/or protecting their source watersheds. I was struck by the complete lack of financial resources that made the conventional methods to clean up water, which all have a relatively high associated cost, useless for them. At that time, I was thinking a lot about cheap ways to improve water quality and how poor water quality can impact all organisms, not just humans. I started getting interested in studying the role that vegetation plays in nutrient and contaminant cycling in river networks. It was interesting enough to me that when I returned to the U.S. I left my career in Mechanical Engineering behind to pursue a PhD.    

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The incorporation of aquatic ecology into water quality models. Aquatic vegetation, floodplain vegetation, and filter feeding organisms can all change hydrological conditions and water chemistry yet are seldom incorporated into water quality models. We represent microbial processes better! For example, filter feeding organisms such as freshwater mussels alter water quality by filtering out suspended particulates. In large enough numbers or in slow enough flow rates, mussels can have a measureable effect on water clarity. I think that experimental researchers recognize that interactions between hydrology and larger organisms can be significant but they are still not yet well incorporated into river network or watershed models.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really like the review paper by Catriona Hurd (2000), “Water motion, marine macroalgal physiology, and production”. This was the first paper I encountered that laid out the interdependencies between the hydrodynamics and the ecology of a system including implications for nutrient and carbon cycling, light availability, productivity and imposed environmental conditions on other dependent organisms within the kelp canopy. In addition, she described eco-hydro connections at a large range of spatial scales which shows how complex some of these questions can be.    

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I go outside and walk somewhere wild. I bring my binoculars and one of my kids and I see what I can see. Binoculars are great conversation starters – people often stop us and ask what we have seen! I also like to camp, swim, paddleboard and read.  
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MEET A LEAF: RYAN MORRISON

2/4/2019

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Dr. Ryan Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University (Twitter: @ryanrmorrison)
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?

The “eco” and ecohydrology really adds a new dimension to hydrology compared to how hydrology is taught in engineering disciplines. This new dimension is really exciting, especially when incorporated with water management and linked with human needs. The field of ecohydrology demonstrates the complex interactions between aquatic ecosystems and natural hydrologic cycles, which is important for informing how we manage and restore aquatic environments.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My education is in civil engineering, through and through. I received my B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from Washington State University, and my Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Although all my degrees are in civil engineering, I was lucky to collaborate with a lot of non-engineers, especially riparian and aquatic ecologists, during my education. While an undergraduate student I worked for Mark Stone (who became my PhD advisor years later!) on his PhD research examining the links between hydraulic turbulence and periphyton grown in cobble-bed rivers, and from that point forward I’ve been interested in ecohydrological questions. This interest has allowed me to work on a variety of ecohydrology-related topics while in my graduate and post-graduate roles, including the impacts of river management on riparian vegetation recruitment, the influence of levees on floodplain wetland habitat, and socio-ecological tradeoffs associated with environmental flows. Much of my research now focuses on the importance of floodplain services for ecological and geomorphic processes and how we can better integrate floodplain services into river management.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think we still have a lot to learn regarding the interactions between surface water exchange flows and floodplain vegetation. There has been some great work recently published about the importance of subsurface hydrologic exchange flows and their importance in riverine processes, but we are still struggling to quantify surface exchange flows during flooding events. The lessons learned from research about the interaction of floodplain vegetation, hydrologic dynamics, and floodplain ecosystem services can help move river restoration science forward.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I always come back to H.B.N. Hynes’ “The Stream and Its Valley” (1975), especially the concluding paragraph. Although encompassing more than ecohydrology, it is a beautifully written lecture about the inseparable interactions between river biotic and abiotic processes. I wish all papers were written as clearly and succinctly as this one.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Lately, my fun-time is spent either running on Colorado trails or enjoying the company of my 4-year old daughter. Both are exhausting!
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