​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. 

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.

Dr. Lauren McPhillips is an Assistant Professor co-appointed in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Penn State University.

Shishir Basant is a PhD candidate working with Dr. Brad Wilcox in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at Texas A&M University. 

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.   

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

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.

​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   

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.

​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. 

Dr. Gabriele Manoli is a Branco Weiss Fellow holding a postdoc position at ETH Zürich (transitioning to a lecturer position at University College London).

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

Dr. Amy Hansen is an Assistant Professor in the ​Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Kansas.

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.  

Dr. Ryan Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University (Twitter: @ryanrmorrison)