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MEET A LEAF: Esteban Jobbágy

1/28/2019

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Dr. Esteban Jobbágy is a Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Luis & CONICET, San Luis – Argentina (-33.292, -66.342).  @ejobbagy
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
(A very biased and, perhaps, emotional take on this) The notion of “Ecoydrology” in my mind points to the biota and the rules of the living world commanding the vagaries of water cycling on Earth. Probably, our world is much more biotic than what most Earth scientist still accept or grasp. For me Ecohydrology has its most exciting front in this realization and the one that comes automatically after it: By shaping the world´s biota, we, humans, are transforming the water cycle too.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Doubtful on whether I wanted to be a park ranger, a mountain guide or a field biologist I decided to study Agronomy in Universidad de Buenos Aires in my home city. I graduated in 1993 and I am still proud of being and Aggie and a lot of my current research involves crops, farms and farmers. In 2002 I obtained my PhD in Biology from Duke University in the US, under Rob Jackson´s advice. My dissertation explored how plants redistributed nutrients vertically. Duke and Rob´s lab where like home for many years since then.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Like the most important things in life, almost by chance. I was working with soil nutrients in the plains of Argentina, specifically using islands of tree plantations within the grasslands to explore nutrient uplift by plants. I started realizing that groundwater was a very important part of the system and I needed to understand its role exchanging materials (nutrients/salts) with plants and soils from below. Pulling from that thread I discovered the amazing “beast” that shallow water tables in the plains can be. They are the hub of many processes and they are present not just in a few rare spots like lowlands or riparian areas, but almost everywhere. They are also a powerful connector among landscape patches and a tremendous source of hydrological and ecological inertia. That thread took me directly into the world of vegetation-groundwater interactions and from there to land cover-atmosphere feedbacks, vegetation and flood dynamics, evaporation/transpiration and salt dynamics.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
As the number one challenge and emerging area I would put Human-Water links. This is not about making our science useful to people (which off course is great!), it is about transforming it to understand how the behavior of humans and human organizations regarding water shape the water cycle.  How do poor vs. rich or democratic vs. autocratic societies respond to wetting or drying climate trends (e.g. In a drying context, which ones would build more dams, become more water use efficient, or outsource water consuming activities?) Different responses will leave a different imprint on the water cycle locally and globally. Or let think about cultivated landscapes and how farming decision rules (e.g. to irrigation or not, to do paddy rice or dryland maize as agriculture expands to higher slopes in the tropics, to insist with soybean cultivation at the onset of floods or to switch to pastures instead) will translate into positive or negative hydrological feedbacks? I feel we know disproportionally more about the biophysical than the human controls of water fluxes on Earth, yet the Anthropocene is here asking for a change in our focus. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I would mention Immanuel Noy Meir´s review in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 1973, but Amilcare Porporato already mentioned it in his leaf not so long ago. So, I will bring instead a book that I consider revolutionary. It´s Bill Schlesinger “Biogeochemistry”  Now in its 3rd edition, this book combines and extremely powerful synthesis of data with deep and ambitious underlaying plan which, in my opinion, is to show how we can approach the complexity of the Earth System and it’s response to the growing influence of humans from the perspective of the circulation of materials. In each chapter there is a very clever story highlighting the role of the biota and humans and their trends in Earth’s history. Many of the synthesis tables of the book could have been the core of top cited papers, but Bill opted to go for a more comprehensive and efficient way of making his point and reaching young scientists: A full book. This book transformed my thinking about our world.  Interestingly the water chapter is not the strongest one, likely because at that time the understanding of the “bio” part of the water cycle was running behind what was known in the case of the carbon or phosphorus cycles. Still, the book is in the foundation of the careers of many ecohydrologists.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to swim. In the pool several days a week, in the ocean or the lakes when I can. I even swim sometimes to put sensors in the lakes of the Pampas. I also like hiking and running and enjoy cooking everyday food. I also get thrilled when I can become a part-time hunter-gatherer looking for nuts in abandoned homesteads in the sierra or fishing for dinner at the beach. Nature is the place I pick to work and play and sharing life with my two (grown) boys, my partner, my friends and family and the amazing team with whom we built the lab in San Luis, is the biggest joy. 
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MEET A LEAF: Nandita Basu

1/21/2019

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Dr. Nandita Basu is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo.  Twitter: @nanditabasu2
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
From a definitional perspective, ecohydrology is a study of the interactions between water and ecosystems. For me, ecohydrology is the science of natural systems, because the only way to truly understand natural systems is through exploring the connections and feedbacks between the various subsystems of our natural world -- between ecology, hydrology, geochemistry geomorphology -- and between natural and social systems. These feedbacks create interesting and unexpected patterns, ranging from fractal network formations in rivers, wetlands and coastal areas to ridge and slough landscapes in the Everglades to dryland vegetation patterns. Understanding patterns in natural systems using simple scientific principles, and being able to use this understanding to manage our landscapes more sustainably lies at the center of my love for ecohydrology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
All my degrees are in Civil and Environmental Engineering. My undergraduate and masters degrees are from Jadavpur University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in India, while my PhD degree is from Purdue University, US.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My first foray into ecohydrology started in my undergraduate years when I did a project on the Kolkata wetlands, a 125-square km area of natural and human-made wetlands, lying downstream of the city of Kolkata in India.  These wetlands not only provide flood defense against rising sea levels, but are an amazing example of a coupled natural and human system, where salt marshes and settling ponds coexist, where nutrient from the cities’ waste is used for sustaining fish farms and agriculture. Developmental pressures and a lack of an understanding of the true value of this amazing ecosystem are contributing to the wetlands being lost at an alarming rate. Coming from a traditional engineering background, where a wetland is treated as a reactor with a rate constant, the intricacies of the coupled dynamics of this highly complex system intrigued and fascinated me. For me, ecohydrology is about understanding these interactions between natural and human systems, and developing strategies to protect our natural system in a changing landscape.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
In the last decade, we have seen an exponential increase in the incidences of algal blooms and hypoxic zones in our water bodies despite huge amounts of money and effort being invested in curbing nutrient pollution. Incidences of harmful algal blooms are being reported even in some of the more “pristine” lakes. What makes this a really interesting and challenging problem is that while multiple factors have been implicated -- ranging from a changing climate (changing precipitation and ice duration) to aquatic and terrestrial legacies, to changing nutrient ratios that trigger different algal species -- we are still struggling to develop a comprehensive understanding of the drivers and controls of these blooms and the strategies to improve water quality, given changing climate and population pressures. I consider this to be one of the most exciting areas of ecohydrology.

Almost concurrent with increasing water quality threats we have seen an exponential increase in our ability to harness massive geospatial datasets in the last decade, and I expect that learning from this data will allow us to see the forest from the trees, to go beyond our own streams or lakes to find global patterns and unifying theories, and will contribute to the greatest advances in ecohydrology. From a personal perspective, for data nerds like me, the ability to synthesize, understand and learn from disparate systems, using regional and global databases is like solving a large jigsaw puzzle - where the story gets clearer as you find more and more connections – and gives you hours of pure, unadulterated joy.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
This is a tough question…there are so many papers I love. For me, interesting papers are those that challenge the existing paradigm – one such paper is the Bernhardt et al. Perspectives paper “Cleaner Lakes are Dirtier Lakes,” and the related Finlay et al. paper. “Human Influences on Nitrogen Removal in lakes.”

The existing paradigm is that reductions in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) loads to our water bodies will lead to water quality improvement. These papers show, using a global lake dataset, that reduction in P inputs can actually contribute to a reduction in a lake’s denitrification potential, thus increasing N exports and contributing to N pollution in downstream coastal waters. Reduction in P inputs to lakes can decrease algal production, and thus algal uptake of N, and subsequently decrease mineralization and denitrification of algal N in lake sediments. 

These two papers are a brilliant example of unintended consequences, how attempting to solve one problem in a connected system can exacerbate another problem, unless we take a more holistic approach. This to me is the essence of ecohydrology.  



What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I have a 4-year old – so fun includes erupting baking soda volcanoes, making electric dough and bouncy eggs, hiking in the woods, making snow angels, and answering a gazillion “why” questions. Guilty pleasures when he is asleep or otherwise occupied range from escape rooms with my amazing lab group to board games to reading, tweeting and Netflix binging. In the past, one of the most fun things I have done is skydiving – hope to do it again someday with my son when he is older.
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MEET A LEAF: JIA HU

1/14/2019

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Dr. Jia Hu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Arizona.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is a field of research that links hydrological and ecological processes by studying the feedbacks that occur between both components. I am completely biased, but I do believe that some of the most exciting hydrology related research is currently related to ecohydrology.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley.
Graduate degree was in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from CU Boulder.


How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My undergraduate and graduate research interests were mainly focused on plant water and carbon relations. However, as I began collaborating more with watershed hydrologists, I realized how important it was to take a broader, landscape perspective. By focusing primarily on plant water cycling, I had been completely ignoring how water got to the plants in the first place. By recognizing that soil, plant, and atmospheric water cycling were inextricably linked, I began to take a more holistic approach to research and begin to ask more exciting questions.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Because I come from a background in ecology, I may view ecohydrology differently than most ‘ecohydrologists.’ The discipline of ecohydrology arose from hydrology, and I would argue that a more accurate description of the field in its current state is ‘hydrological-ecology,’ since hydrology is still very much the main focus. However, the field is rapidly changing and the integration of both hydrologic and ecologic processes is becoming more common.

One of the most exciting areas are research in ecohydrology is our ability to begin describing mechanisms that govern how water moves through complex landscapes (e.g. mountain watersheds), and the subsequent response by vegetation once water becomes available. By moving beyond simply describing patterns of water availability and water use, but testing mechanisms on why water moves or how it is used in a particular way, the field of ecohydrology can truly begin to integrate both disciplines.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Most of us are taught that water typically moves from the soil, to the roots, and then to the atmosphere (i.e. SPAC); however, it is becoming increasingly common to find studies that show direct uptake of water from the leaves and the subsequent downward movement of water into trunks of trees. This mainly occurs in foggy or cloudy environments, where cloud water or fog can be a critical moisture source. This ‘wicking’ of occult precipitation from the atmosphere is not only important in regulating plant water status, but it can also being an important moisture source in stream and even ground water (e.g. cloud water input, fog drip, etc.). Thus, my favorite ecohydrology ‘paper’ is not a paper, but a book, titled, ‘Tropical Montane Cloud Forests: Science for Conservation and Management,’ Eds. Bruijnzeel, Scatena, and Hamilton. While the scope of this book is about cloud forests, the perspective that fog and cloud water can be important sources of moisture is quite important. Furthermore, if we begin to lose vegetation from these tropical cloud forests, from either deforestation or ‘cloud-lifting,’ then there may be less precipitation inputs into tropical headwater ecosystems, leading to less streamflow in the lowland tropics, particularly during the dry season. These feedbacks between vegetation and hydrology are tightly coupled in these systems, and offers exciting opportunities for research!
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love being outdoors and working in the field is one of my favorite things to do. When I lived in Boulder, CO and Bozeman, MT, skiing and hiking were my two favorite activities. Now that I live in Tucson, I am trying to take advantage of being able to hike 365 days of the year. I have two kids who are now finally big enough to hike longer distances on their own and it is my goal to explore more of AZ this year. At home, I love to cook, and spending hours on Sunday afternoon cooking a big family meal is a perfect way to wrap up the weekend.
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MEET A LEAF: AMILCARE PORPORATO

1/7/2019

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Dr. Amilcare Porporato is the Thomas J. Wu ’94 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology makes hydrology extremely interesting, pushing us to explore how the water cycle affects our environment and forcing us to venture into other disciplines. More profoundly, using the words of the great Jacques Cousteau, ecohydrology reminds us that ‘water and life are one and the same’.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I technically do not have an undergraduate degree, because up until few years ago in the Italian system one would directly go for a 5-year master’s degree (laurea). Thus, after a classical high school, I got my laurea in civil engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin (with specialization in hydraulic engineering) in 1992 and then, after a year of civil service in alternative to the military service, I started a PhD in hydraulic engineering, jointly with the Turin and Milan polytechnics. My PhD thesis (1996) was on nonlinear time series analysis for near wall turbulence and flood forecasting.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
By solving an equation for the steady state probability density function (PDF) of soil moisture, in Jan 1998. I was a researcher (assistant professor), working in a tiny office of the mezzanine of the department of hydraulics at the polytechnic of Turin in collaboration with my great colleague and friend Luca Ridolfi. I was to visit Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe for a junior sabbatical at TAMU in the coming months and we had discussed two topics of research: land-atmosphere interaction and stochastic soil moisture dynamics. Ignacio sent us a fax with a stochastic differential equation that he had formulated with David Cox. It soon became clear that the loss function in this equation contained, in a nutshell, lots of ecohydrology. I’ve kept working on this equation (among other things) for more than twenty years now! I’ve always been very interested in water-plant relationships, so adding pieces to this equation and coupling it to other systems has been fun.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Ecohydrology gives us knowledge and tools to manage our soil and water resources in a more sustainable way. As I often joke with my students, however, if the ‘ideal politician’ (of an equally ideal society) came and asked the ecohydrologists what the best way is to manage our ecosystems (e.g., type of crops, irrigation and fertilization practices, etc. to avoid land and water degradation, while providing good food in a changing climate), I don’t think we would have a good answer. As silly as this joke may sound, it may be a good way for us to formulate well defined problems, which is crucial to make progress, before (or in parallel to) adding the full complexity of the interacting social system; a bit like we do in hydrology with the potential evapotranspiration concept to provide an upper bound to the actual evapotranspiration.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I have several of course, but I want to mention here the paper by Guido Salvucci, Estimating the moisture dependence of root zone water loss using conditionally averaged precipitation. Water Resources Research, 37(5), 1357-1365, 2001. This paper used a network of soil moisture measurements in a very clever way to fit the soil moisture PDF and from there obtain the shape of the loss function. The paper is very well done, elegant and insightful. Personally, I also like it because it provided a confirmation that our soil moisture PDF obtained three years earlier made sense when compared with real data.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like mountaineering, gardening, and painting.
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MEET A LEAF: Aurora Kagawa-Viviani

12/31/2018

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Aurora Kagawa-Viviani is currently a PhD candidate with Thomas Giambelluca in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. 
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
My labmate and I joke about the term’s ambiguity since another ecohydrology lab on campus focuses on surface water flows and aquatic organisms; but our lab focuses on forests and fluxes. I fall on the ecology end of the ecohydrology spectrum and enjoy thinking about water fluxes and pools via their influence on plant community structure and succession.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in environmental engineering (MIT) and a master’s degree in botany (University of Hawaiʻi).

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Looking back, I realize I’ve been exposed to ecohydrology since my undergrad days, but it has taken me time to understand the field through my own experiences. As an undergrad in the Parsons Lab (MIT), I had little context or appreciation for the high-level work being done in my own department. I spent my summers doing conservation biology fieldwork back home in Hawaiʻi. During my MS program, my advisor Kāʻeo Duarte had me read the mathematically oriented papers of Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe and colleagues, and I was co-advised by ecophysiologist Lawren Sack. I struggled with the different scales, methods, and perspectives of engineering and ecophysiology and found overlap of these realms in forestry research. I leaned heavily on this community and body of work during my master’s project using sapflow methods, which was driven by local land managers’ interest in the hydrologic value of different forest covers. While working with my energetic co-advisors was exciting, doing this within a community of classically-trained organismal, community, and evolutionary biology- focused botanists was sometimes disorienting, I appreciate the grounding I gained in plant science basics.

After my MS, I worked as a technician on a pre-contact Hawaiian dryland systems project led by Peter Vitousek. My job included running unirrigated sweet potato cropping experiments across a steep rainfall gradient to assess yield potential across the once expansive Leeward Kohala Field System (in C4 pasture grass for the last 100 years). With no available reference system to help us reconstruct field conditions, we drew inferences from patterns of current soil fertility, archaeological and ethnographic records, and insights from rural community members and project scientists. The experience was forensic and creative- gathering evidence and imagining what the system might have been like. It was also experimental- attempting to reconstruct and produce harvests to understand how farmers sustained staple crop production through seasonal and intra-annual drought and desiccating winds. Throughout my time in the field, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the heck you grow plants without much water—of course, doing this was technically my job. I was fascinated by our driest, hottest, most challenging site. I started to think about water limitation at different scales of time and space, both the sheltering of our crops from the wind, and, outside of our fenced plots, the seasonal rotation and cutting of cattle herds during the ongoing multi-year drought. Insights and theory from ecohydrology seem particularly relevant and useful to the more applied issues of maintaining and/or restoring natural and agro-ecosystems in the face of natural cycles of drought and anthropogenic (hydro)climate change.

It took me a few years to return to graduate school to pursue the PhD, but during those years, I visited and read up about dry systems. While an interest in dryland socio-ecological systems drew me back to grad school, my dissertation work now focuses on the impacts and mechanisms of plant invasion in dry to mesic Hawaiian forests. Lessons from pulsed systems provide a useful lens as I analyze my sensor data for ecological responses and hydrological processes; and my previous work experiences help me think about which processes might be the most important across Hawaiʻi’s heterogenous landscapes.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
My personal bias is that emerging areas of ecohydrology (or perhaps a major gap) may be driven by geography and enabled through continued innovations that bring down research costs. After attending the Asia-Oceania Geosciences Society meeting this past summer and the Tropical Ecohydrology Chapman meeting in Cuenca, Ecuador in 2016, I now feel that ecohydrology has strong relevance for the quickly developing “Global South.” Enhancing local research capacity in these regions seems especially important given rapid land use change and the tropical and subtropical hydroclimatic settings of many of these countries.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Noy-Meir, I. 1973. Desert Ecosystems: Environment and Producers. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4:25–51.

This classic review provided me a conceptual framework for reading the tremendous body of literature (ecology and ecohydrology) that sprung out of it. 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
When I am not grad-studenting (getting a computer screen tan), I enjoy hiking and learning about different ecosystems/communities with my partner who is a microbial oceanographer and ecologist. I also spend time exploring archived information on Hawaiian sweet potato varieties, gardening, reading about social movements, visiting older relatives, and informally mentoring younger students on how to navigate the undergrad/grad labyrinth.
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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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MEET A LEAF: LIXIN WANG

10/29/2018

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Dr. Lixin Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Twitter: @ecohydro_wang
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary science bridging hydrology and ecosystem science. Ecohydrology answers some of the most pressing questions facing human society. For example, how does earth system respond to climate change? Whether we will have enough food to feed everyone under climate change?
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My BS degree is in Biology (Hebei University) and PhD degree is in Environmental Science (University of Virginia). I had two great PhD advisors - Dr. Steve Macko taught me everything about stable isotopes (which is a major tool I use in ecohydrology), and Dr. Paolo D’Odorico led me to the exciting field of ecohydrology.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My PhD work focused on savanna ecosystems in southern Africa, where ecohydrology is very relevant and important. That is where my ecohydrology journey started. My postdoc work with Dr. Kelly Caylor reinforced my passion in dryland ecohydrology.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m sure everyone has their own perspectives. I think how vegetation responds to water-stress across scales and the interactions between water and biogeochemical cycles are two important emerging areas. Big data is also an important emerging area not only to ecohydrology, but to most disciplines.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I have difficulty answering “favorite” questions. I remember reading the following paper repeatedly when I first started appreciating stochastic modeling framework and thinking about the linkage between hydrology and biogeochemical cycles.
Porporato, A., D’odorico, P., Laio, F. and Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., 2003. Hydrologic controls on soil carbon and nitrogen cycles. I. Modeling scheme. Advances in Water Resources, 26(1), pp.45-58.

 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy traveling to appreciate various landscapes and to experience different cultures. I enjoy reading biography books and see how the great minds think of lives. I was a big fan of science fiction when I was young and still truly enjoy them when I get time.
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