Benjamin Keenan is a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Researching palaeohydrology and the ways that humans responded to climatic and environmental change in the past can provide reference points and insights for contemporary and future responses to anthropogenic environmental change.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
MGeol Geological Sciences
PhD Biogeochemistry

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I am researching changing vegetation and climate in Central America using isotope analyses of plant wax n-alkanes. The lowland Maya people are thought to have abandoned their population centres as a result of drought. I think about the interactions between water and ecological systems in the past, today and in the future. For a proxy calibration project I collected well waters from residential buildings in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala and loved getting to talk about water access and quality, and getting to know the people living there. I like swimming in lakes and I want people to enjoy clean water.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Looking at human and non-human interactions in the past can be an interesting lens through which we can look at approaches to contemporary questions, including ecohydrological ones. The novel application of proxies to lake sediments, for example, reveals changes in vegetation, water availability, demography, and fire-use over thousands of years. “Where archaeology cannot go…..”

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I like papers that use novel approaches to solving problems, especially problems of understanding the past… “Not a bathtub: A consideration of sea-level physics for archaeological models of human migration,” a paper by Marisa Borreggine in the Journal of Archaeological Science looks at reconstructing past sea level to better understand how people interacted with landscapes and human migration in the past.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy eating and cooking for friends, gardening, and jazz. I also like to stretch my legs…..i’ve spent the past few years tour biking all over the beautiful province of Québec, where the people and the bike paths are like nowhere else. Quel plaisir!

Dr. Lin Meng is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Twitter: @Linmengmet. Website: https://menglinmet.wixsite.com/meng

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me means understanding the relationship between water and vegetation at various scales and how this relationship changes under the changing environments (e.g., drought and heatwave). This includes many processes, for example the loss of water through the tiny pores in leaves. Ecohydrology integrates processes and mechanisms from soil, plants, and atmosphere together, providing a unique lens to understand land-atmosphere interaction through plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received an undergraduate degree from Shenyang Agricultural University, China, a master degree from Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, China, and a PhD from Iowa State University, USA. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where I am studying forest-atmosphere exchange of carbon, water, and energy in Amazonia.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I got interested in ecohydrology through studying phenology during my PhD (Check out my award essay Green with Phenology in Science). The timing when trees leaf-out or falling leaves affected the timing and magnitude of transpiration throughout the year. This phenological feedback on water cycle brought me to NGEE-Tropic project (https://ngee-tropics.lbl.gov/) last year as a postdoc at Berkeley Lab. From there, I started to look at processes associated with large-scale forest-atmosphere exchange of water in Amazonia. I am currently focusing on applying ecological and plant physiological theory to explore mechanistic process of evapotranspiration during droughts and how it responds to soil moisture and temperature stress. Check out my 2021 AGU presentation. I also run and parameterize the ELM-FATES and E3SM (the DOE land and Earth system models) to simulate water cycles of Amazon evergreen forests.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
New satellite data at high spatial and temporal resolutions will provide many exciting opportunities to study ecohydrological processes. For example, ECOSTRESS measure the canopy temperature heating up as the plants run out of water, to better understand how much water plants need and how they respond to changing environment at a 70m spatial resolution on a daily basis. Understanding diurnal pattern of ecohydrological processes at a large scale is critical to improve models and accurately predict how ecosystem respond under future climate change.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I enjoy reading many papers on ecohydrology but one of my favorites is Mechanisms linking drought, hydraulics, carbon metabolism, and vegetation mortality by Nate McDowell. This paper talks about the underlying mechanism that drives the hydraulics failure and carbon starvation, therefore provide an integrated view on the drought-induced mortality. Drought is the dominate driver on tree mortality, but drought interacts with many other factors like temperature and light in affecting trees. This paper gives me a clear view and helps me understand the complex processes that happen during the drought. And there are many processes that we don’t fully know yet.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy going for a walk, or for a hike in the nature when I am not doing research. I also run half marathons and photograph in my free time. Photography allows me to discover the beauty of world I live in and appreciate nature.

Indira Paudel is a Post-doctoral research associate at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology means vegetation response to soil and atmospheric climate for water. It is all about how plants influence water resources and how water availability affects the functioning and services of plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.Sc.(2010) in Agriculture specialization in Soil science and Agri-engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal.  After my undergraduate program, I moved to Israel for a Diploma in High-tech Agriculture, then joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Rehovot for my graduate degrees [M.Sc. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018)] in soil and water sciences.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
The world is changing rapidly and unpredictably, and plant productivity has been declining, primarily because of the limitation of water resources.  As global warming intensifies, so are trees and forests' water needs. We need to improve our understanding of increasing water use efficiency to a future environmental condition.  In my graduate research career, I wanted to improve the water productivity of tree crops in arid regions. With time, I started to release the border impact of ecohydrology in the future of global environmental change. I am currently interested in improving our understanding and minimizing future projections of ecohydrological feedback on the forested ecosystem. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Recent research has focused on climate extremes, but minimal attention has been given to the effects of chronic environmental changes in eco-hydrological processes. For years, ecohydrology has been less studied due to high temporal and spatial heterogeneity in soils, vegetation, and climate patterns across the scales. The evolution of high thoughtful sensing technology and remote sensing products has resulted in an explosion of applications relevant to managing and monitoring natural resources. Combined, data availability and increased computing power have opened the door for modeling and studying ecohydrological patterns at larger scales to inform water budgets. These tools may help quantify the intensity of chronic effects of environmental changes and improve future productions.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I keep two of my favorite articles all the time in my backpack.

1. McDowell, N.G., Fisher, R.A., Xu, C., Domec, J.C., Hölttä, T., Mackay, D.S., Sperry, J.S., Boutz, A., Dickman, L., Gehres, N. and Limousin, J.M., 2013. Evaluating theories of drought‐induced vegetation mortality using a multimodel–experiment framework. New Phytologist, 200(2), pp.304-321.
2. Trugman, A.T., Anderegg, L.D., Shaw, J.D. and Anderegg, W.R., 2020. Trait velocities reveal that mortality has driven widespread coordinated shifts in forest hydraulic trait composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(15), pp.8532-8538.

McDowell et al. (2013) are the complete packages of effects of drought in plant functioning from measurements to global projections.  Trugman et al. (2020) gave fantastic ideas of trait velocity with time. Both articles help me understand overall ecohydrological responses from molecule to global scale.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love hiking, reading biography books, and spending time with my family. 

Carter Berry is a Research Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University.

Abhilash Singh is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal, India. (Twitter: @MrIfAndOnlyIf) (Website: https://www.abhilashsingh.net)

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology is a relatively new field which has piqued my interest because it is and will be the need of the hour in our highly degrading and modified biosphere. I see a bright future in the field of eco-hydrology due to its flexibility in integrating different scientific disciplines in problem solving. The spatio-temporal interaction between ecological systems and the hydrological cycle, which facilitates us to understand the interface between ecology, hydrology, and the associated application, is the new frontier in Human Landscapes studies.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have completed an integrated Master of Technology (B.Tech.+ M.Tech.) degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering with specialization in Wireless Communication and Networks from Gautam Buddha University, Greater Noida, India in 2017. I was the recipient of the gold medal award in the university. Presently, I am pursuing a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Environment Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal. Where I am working on "Potential of dual-frequency polarimetry Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data processing to estimate soil moisture and its application in drainage congestion, waterlogging, and flood prediction using deep learning" under the supervision of Dr. Kumar Gaurav.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Being an interdisciplinary researcher, I love to explore the possible connection between two different physical processes, such as connecting the surface soil moisture with waterlogging problem. This further raised my curiosity on a contemporary health issue in the region which led to connecting waterlogging with the number of malaria cases or with groundwater contamination.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
From my point of view, the study of the dynamics of surface and subsurface soil moisture, drainage congestion, and waterlogging is one of the most emerging areas mainly because these factors affect ecohydrological processes such as infiltration, surface runoff, evaporation, and plant morphology & function (i.e., transpiration rate).
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
After my masters, I was a complete novice in this particular field, so my interest were objective driven. However, a work on the impact of flow regulation on the habitat of the Ganga River dolphin by Sonkar and Gaurav published in the River Research Application caught my attention. Their simple yet novel work inspired me to look beyond the scope of my research practice and indulge in asking more biodiversity-oriented research questions. Integrating the real time impact of man-made environmental issue on the ecology of a hydrological system is the need of the hour for any eco-sensitive zone. Another work, if I must mention is The Natural Flow Regime by Poff et al., 1997, which is quite known in the scientific community. This work provided an insight to a novice like me trying to understand dynamics between river hydrology and ecology and the necessary aspects one must take into consideration when working in eco-hydrology.

References:
Sonkar, G. K., & Gaurav, K. (2020). Assessing the impact of large barrages on habitat of the Ganga River dolphin. River Research and Applications, 36(9), 1916–1931.
Poff, N. L., Allan, J. D., Bain, M. B., Karr, J. R., Karen, L., Richter, B. D., Sparks, R. E., Stromberg, J. C., Poff, N. L., Allan, J. D., Bain, M. B., Karr, J. R., Prestegaard, K. L., Richter, B. D., Sparks, R. E., & Stromberg, J. C. (1997). The natural flow regime. A paradigm for river conservation and restoration. Oxford Journals, 47(11), 769–784.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to write scientific blogs on Medium (https://abhilash-singh.medium.com/). Apart from this, I enjoy spending time on learning other languages.

Dr. Safeeq Khan is a Cooperative Extension Specialist and Adjunct Professor of Water and Watershed Sciences in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Merced.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology means studying how water and vegetation interact across a range of settings and scales and the degree to which these interactions are altered and reshaped by human actions, both direct and indirect. Ecohydrology also means working with our stakeholders in developing data and solutions to help inform ecosystem management and build resilience.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have a B.Tech (2003) in Agricultural Engineering from CSA University of Agriculture & Technology and a M.Tech (2005) in Agricultural Systems Management from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, both from India. After a brief period working in the industry, I moved to the University of Hawaii at Manoa and graduated with a PhD (2010) in Natural Resources and Environmental Management.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Trees and plants are mysterious, magical, and sophisticated, and deserve much more appreciation than they receive. From single-celled algae to the giant sequoia, everything seems to be ostensibly defying the laws of physics. Add soil and water to the mix and now you have something that is even more magical and mysterious, aka the field of ecohydrology. For me, this appreciation for trees and plant and how they interact with their environment goes back to my early days growing up in a farming family in the rural North India. Like most farm kids, I was juggling between school and helping my family by working on the farm. Chasing wetting fronts inside furrows and fields during irrigation and running in freshly harvested rice fields to experience the splashing of saps from stumps continuing to push water and nutrients from roots to the leaves were the favorite pastime. Observing plants perking right back up from wilt within minutes after irrigation and comparing shades of roots with iron plaquing were no less than miracles. Of course, at that time I had no idea of sap or plant’s ability and endurance against stress.
 
These early experiences, however, certainly shaped my curiosity and early education, but it was not until I started the graduate school that I learned about the role of humans in actively reshaping our planet and saw research as a career. Much credit goes to my advisor Professor BS Das at IIT Kharagpur, who really exposed me to the field of ecohydrology (or soil physics as he would like to call) and science. He is the one who introduced me the idea of macropores, how plants utilize it to their advantage, and giving me the opportunity to perform my first tracer test. In my early days I saw earthworms and other forms of soil life as villains trying to destroy embankments and draining water, but the close examination changed my views. Soil organisms turned out to be real heroes, particularly earthworms. At the end of my masters, Professor Das gave me the opportunity to work on land-use and erosion issues related to Chilika Lake, Asia's largest brackish water lagoon in eastern India. Degradation of such a beautiful lake was saddening to observe but seeing some of the ecohydrological solutions implemented by the locals gave me a hope. I carried these experiences and skills to the other side of the world in Hawaii where my PhD advisor Professor Ali Fares gave me the opportunity to investigate the role of invasive species and human activities to hydrological cycle. Professor Tom Giambelluca selflessly taught me canopy water balance 101. Doing a PhD on a small island had its disadvantages, especially during the pre-zoom era, but looking back, I feel like small places like these give you the real opportunity to engage with local people and learn native ways of interacting with nature and preserving/managing our natural resources. I finished my PhD with a realization that we cannot fully understand the interaction between vegetation and water without considering the role of humans. Humans are essential elements of ecohydrology and altering the system at a faster rate than nature.
 
Shaped by this realization, much of my current work has been largely influenced by Professor Gordon Grant, my postdoc advisor at the Oregon State, and Professor Naomi Tague at UC Santa Barbara. These two scientific giants introduced me to the world of forest management and the role of local settings, geology in particular, and critical zone in modulating the interactions between vegetation and water under natural and disturbed conditions. While Professor Gordon Grant gave me the freedom to expand my wings and fly on my own (THANK YOU Gordon), Professor Naomi Tague introduced me to the world of ecohydrological modeling that I continue to use in my research lab.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
My personal bias is for disturbance ecohydrology. I do not think we fully understand the post-disturbance soil-water-vegetation interactions. In particular, the intricacies of roots in accessing and sharing resources like water. Managing our water resources while actively trying to achieve the climate change goals through carbon sequestration is another emerging area. Ecohydrology can offer a great deal in understanding water-carbon tradeoffs. Years of critical zone science has certainly improved our understanding of the subsurface, but transferability and scaling continue to pose challenges. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I do not have a favorite paper but much of my scientific thinking around ecohydrology has been shaped by Dr. Brent Newman’s paper “Ecohydrology of water-limited environments: A scientific vision”. This paper does a fantastic job in introducing the field of ecohydrology, discusses key scientific challenges, and identifies cross-cutting hurdles in addressing those challenges. Professor Ying Fan’s work on “Hydrologic regulation of plant rooting depth” does a fantastic job in describing roots from hydrologic lens. In my mind, these two papers are a must read for early career researchers looking for ideas. I have also enjoyed reading much of Dr. Nate McDowell and Dr. Craig Allen’s work related to droughts, in particular their paper “Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?”. 
 
Fan, Y., Miguez-Macho, G., Jobbágy, E. G., Jackson, R. B., & Otero-Casal, C. (2017). Hydrologic regulation of plant rooting depth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(40), 10572-10577.
McDowell, N., Pockman, W. T., Allen, C. D., Breshears, D. D., Cobb, N., Kolb, T., ... & Yepez, E. A. (2008). Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?. New phytologist, 178(4), 719-739.
Newman, B. D., Wilcox, B. P., Archer, S. R., Breshears, D. D., Dahm, C. N., Duffy, C. J., ... & Vivoni, E. R. (2006). Ecohydrology of water‐limited environments: A scientific vision. Water resources research, 42(6).
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy watching nature documentaries along with hiking and exploring outdoors with my kids. 

Dr. Jorge M. Uuh Sonda is a CONACYT postdoctoral researcher in the Water Science and Environment Department at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora (ITSON), Mexico. @JorgeUuhSonda

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology is the study of spatial and temporal patterns of hydrological and ecosystem processes, and how they couple and change with socio-environmental phenomena. It is a discipline that allows the study of different ecosystems  using a suite of approaches and tools, ranging from field instrumentation to remote sensing. To my own experience, ecohydrology studies the vertical mass fluxes of the exchanges of two priority gases, water and CO2 (as well as the energy involved in these processes) in dry tropical ecosystems that have very little information about it.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I graduated from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) as an Engineering Physics. I received my M.Sc. degree in Astrophysics at the Universidad de Guanajuato (UG) and my Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), with a dissertation entitled: “Spatial and temporal dynamics of water, carbon and energy fluxes at the surface-atmosphere interface in tropical systems. Yucatan Peninsula”.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
It was a lucky and unconventional opportunity. After finishing my M.Sc. degree, I was undecided whether to continue with the Astrophysics line (almost completely desktop work) or to return to my origins as an Engineer (fieldwork, play with scientific instruments). There were various personal reasons and the projections of an uncertain future that made me more inclined to return to Engineering. Fortunately, exist an excellent engineering institute, very close to where I was born and grew up, whose lines of research focused on subjects that I was very passionate about: Earth Sciences, Marine Sciences, and Atmospheric Science. That is how I met one of my mentors, Dr. Hugo Gutierrez, who proposed to me an Ecohydrology topic: implement a monitoring site with an Eddy Covariance system, to study the temporal dynamics of a dry tropical ecosystem in Yucatán. The challenge, which meant for me a complete change of research area, as well as starting a project of which I had little background, made it become an exciting area with many opportunities. Sometime later another of my mentors, Dr. Bernardo Figueroa, joined this project, with whom I did much of the fieldwork that I like so much.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I think that the ecohydrology of coastal and tropical dry systems, especially in Mexico, is an area of ​​great opportunity. Mainly because few sites have been studied from an ecohydrological perspective.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I don't have a favorite paper, but I really enjoy reading the works of the ITSON ecohydrology group, those of Dr. Zulia Sanchez, Dr. Luis Mendez, Dr. Enrico Yepez, and his students. To mention one, the paper by Granados-Martínez et al., 2021, entitled "Environmental Controls on the Temporal Evolution of Energy and CO2 Fluxes on an Arid Mangrove of Northwestern Mexico", which shows the results of the first Eddy Covariance site in a mangrove from the Mexican Pacific, a feat that I had the joy of knowing personally.

Reference: Granados-Martínez, K. P., Yépez, E. A., Sánchez-Mejía, Z. M., Gutiérrez-Jurado, H. A., & Méndez-Barroso, L. A. (2021). Environmental controls on the temporal evolution of energy and CO2 fluxes on an arid mangrove of Northwestern Mexico. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 126, e2020JG005932. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JG005932

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy watching TV series, going to the movies with my girlfriend, and drinking a good beer with friends (if it is handmade, better). In sports, I like football soccer, and squash. I love to travel and see new places.

Dr. Ge Sun is Research Hydrologist and Project Leader at the Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Research Triangle Park, NC.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology means how forests influence water resources and how water availability affects forest ecosystem functions and services.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
I  attended Beijing Forestry University for my undergraduate majoring in soil and water conservation (1985) and then a master degree program (1988) in forest hydrology in the same university. Then I moved all the way to the West, and got my Ph.D in forest hydrology (1995) from the University of Florida in Gainesville.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Forest hydrology studies the interactions between forests, a long-lived organism, and the water cycles, so forest hydrology is ecohydrology. Forest hydrology was rooted in serving the needs of watershed management and solving emerging environmental issues in the 1960s from soil erosion to acid rain. I have enjoyed doing forest hydrology work since I was undergraduate student. One of the reasons I got interested in this field might be that forest hydrology was full of controversy (mystery) over the past century.  For instance, how reforestation will affect river flow in different regions? Would revegetation revive the lost springs in many parts of the world?  Forest hydrology is getting more important given the importance of forests in carbon sequestration addressing global climate change today.  

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The world is changing rapidly and unpredictably. However, one thing is certain that clean water is in much demand with the rise of human population. With global warming intensifies, so is the water needs by trees and forests. Consequences are dare when the needs by either humans or the ecosystems that people depend on, are not met. Water uses by ecosystems, or the evapotranspiration process, was the center of ecohydrology from the beginning of the ecohydrological science. We have a lot to learn in ET from different perspectives, energy balance, biological, and hydrological processes as influenced by humans. Many of the controversies arise from our inability to quantify ET everywhere (from the leaf to global) and all the time (from minute to millennium).

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My hero in forest hydrology is John Hewlett, the ‘God father’ of forest hydrology. Hewlett’s  paper published in the first international symposium on forest hydrology in 1967 opened my minds while I was a graduate student working in the deep subtropical mountains in southern China. 
Hewlett, J.D. and Hibbert, A.R., 1967. Factors affecting the response of small watersheds to precipitation in humid areas. Forest hydrology, 1, pp.275-290.

This paper explains the ‘Variable Sources Area Concept’, a stream flow generation theory describing the hydrologic processes in humid small headwater forested watersheds. Forested watersheds have high infiltration rate due to the porous soils with extensive root network and also the high evapotranspiration rate (thus drier soils), so overland flow in forests is rare. However, quick flow or torrent stormflow can be generated in saturated riparian areas near stream channels that grow their length and width during storms. This theory represents a shift of traditional flow generation doctrine (Hortonian flow) to one that reflects the role of vegetation covers, thus the biological processes, in modifying the physical processes of water movement. 
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Taking road trip to national forests and parks with families in different seasons has been fun; Other ‘free’ times, I like cooking following YouTube; I also enjoyed chatting with friends over the internet sharing life experiences.

Erica L. McCormick is a Research Scientist Assistant at the Jackson School of Geoscience, University of Texas at Austin.  Twitter: ​@McCormickEricaL

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is an invitation to think complexly about Earth as a whole system, without the confines of traditional disciplines. As so many other “Leafs” have discussed, there is an invitation in ecohydrology to consider processes from the single plant level photosynthetic chemistry all the way to global hydrology. With this breadth comes expertise in topics ranging from mycorrhizal and plant physiology to atmospheric turbulence to hard-core geology and fluid mechanics (not to mention so much more!). I also love how ecohydrology embraces how the “answers” we seek are likely to be complex, nonlinear, and potentially context dependent, which in turn motivates the use of many exciting methods which ecohydrologists are free to use, including field work, remote sensing, modeling, and more!
​
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I got my B.S. in Environmental Science, Geology from the Jackson School of Geoscience at UT Austin. I am applying to U.S. PhD programs right now after COVID-19 messed up my plans to work with Sally Thompson in Perth, Australia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
For most of my pre-college life, I was heart set on being an astronomer. It wasn’t until I went to the Milton Mountain School, a small forestry and farming semester school in rural Vermont, that I was exposed to geoscience. One of our teachers was a self-described geologist, but instead of studying rocks (as I assumed all geologists did), she studied glaciers! This was my first taste of “Earth science.” This realization, coupled with an entire semester spent in the forest, changed my direction entirely. I came to UT ready to find my place in environmental science.

My first exposure to ecohydrology came during a course in my undergrad taught by Ashley Matheny. I loved basically everything about it, from the questions themselves to the field work and coding we employed to answer them. I have had the opportunity to continuously confirm that this field is a good fit for me during my research with Dr. Matheny, Dr. Daniella Rempe, and others since then. I am fully hooked on ecohydro and can’t wait to see what sorts of things I get involved with during my PhD!

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m very early on in my scientific career, but my recent involvement with Daniella Rempe’s lab has convinced me that in order to better understand above-ground plant behavior, we need to better constrain uncertainty in the subsurface, especially with regards to water storage. I am definitely biased because of my excitement about our recent work on bedrock water storage and rock moisture as an important contribution to ET. However, there seems to be a consensus among many ecohydrologists that we need more data and a better understanding of the subsurface. I am excited about several aspects of this “subsurface” focus, and my recent fascinations include understanding how lithologic and soil properties interact with climate to mediate plant water access as well as how plants leverage their below-ground carbon allocation, rooting strategies, and fungal interactions to sustain ET during dry periods.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
“Beyond isohydricity: the role of environmental variability in determining plant drought response” by Xue Feng et al. is my favorite paper, in part because it was one of the first ecohydrology papers I ever read! This paper really kickstarted my ongoing fascination with the way that “categorizing” behaviors we think see in nature (like iso/anisohydricity) can be duped by uncertainties in the myriad environmental factors and the setting in which those behaviors manifest.
 
My hope is that the difficulty we have in nailing down plant drought response is secretly holding a wealth of information about subsurface and water storage dynamics that we can leverage for better understanding of the whole water and carbon cycle. This paper was my first taste of that way of thinking!
 
Feng, Xue, David D. Ackerly, Todd E. Dawson, Stefano Manzoni, Blair McLaughlin, Robert P. Skelton, Giulia Vico, Andrew P. Weitz, and Sally E. Thompson (2019). "Beyond isohydricity: the role of environmental variability in determining plant drought responses." Plant, cell & environment.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Like most ecohydrologists, I love to be outside whenever possible! I especially love to run, swim, cycle, and hike with my dog, Hamilton (though I will report that he much prefers hiking and swimming to running and biking)! During the pandemic, I took up triathlon training, which has been a wonderful distraction as well as a great real-world example of an activity being “about the journey” and not the result. I had the pleasure of running my first race a few months ago, and although I had a blast, it was nowhere near as fun as the daily training. When I’m forced to be indoors, I also like to play bluegrass and americana music and make pottery.