What does ecohydrology mean to you?
My understanding of the term “ecohydrology” has evolved over time. Earlier in my career I mostly associated this term with water-vegetation relationships in water-limited ecosystems, but it has broadened to encompass any research that involves linkages between hydrology and ecological or biogeochemical processes. In truth, this results in quite a bit of overlap between hydrology and ecohydrology because with only certain exceptions can hydrology be studied in isolation from ecological processes.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Earth Sciences from Dartmouth College, and my M.S. and Ph.D. were in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
When I first began my Ph.D. work, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Southern African Regional Science Initiative (SAFARI 2000) project. It was a great opportunity to work alongside world-class scientists in a field setting (the Kalahari region of southern Africa), an environment in which the linkages between water availability and vegetation processes are very evident.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
There’s a lot of potential for research viewing ecohydrology as an optimization problem. For example, this includes strategies for maximizing carbon gain while minimizing water loss at both the individual and ecosystem levels, how this is expressed at the watershed scale, and how this changes over time with rising CO2 levels, increased temperatures, and altered precipitation patterns.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I’ll stick with a classic, by my post-doc advisor Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe: “Ecohydrology: A hydrologic perspective of climate-soil-vegetation dynamics” (Water Resources Research 36(1), 3-9, 2000). At least to me, this paper really defined the subdiscipline and laid out a very in influential vision for future research.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I enjoy playing basketball at lunchtime, when I can get to the gym. I have four kids who are involved in a lot of activities, so I do a lot of driving around and watching soccer games. 

​Xing Li is a postdoc researcher in Research Institute of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University, South Korea.
Twitter: @XingLi83440245

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
For me, ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary field that explores how ecosystems interact with water. My previous research mainly focused on the carbon cycle, and further understanding of ecohydrology will help me mechanistically explain the behavior of ecosystem carbon-water coupling.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
B.S. in Geographic Information System, School of Geosciences, Chengdu University of Technology, China; Ph.D. in Remote Sensing with a thesis entitled ‘Exploring the response of terrestrial ecosystems to drought based on multi-source remote sensing data’, School of Resources and Environment, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I worked on remote sensing during my master's and first-year doctoral study. At that time, I didn't know much about some terminology, such as carbon cycle, water cycle, and ecology. When I started working on satellite solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) to explore how photosynthesis responded to drought, I found that my knowledge was insufficient to explain some of the vegetation behaviors observed by remote sensing. After several years of paper reading and research, now I have a better understanding of the interaction between ecosystems and climate change. But to present an interesting, solid science story, I still have to work harder to understand more about their interactions among ecosystems, carbon cycle, water cycle and so on. Ecohydrology is an indispensable field for me to study.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
At the leaf and canopy scales, the interactions between ecosystems and the environment are relatively well understood. Large-scale investigations using remote sensing still have many uncertainties. Currently, some emerging satellite observations have the potential for studying how plant functioning and ecosystem processes vary over the course of the diurnal cycle. This is a cutting-edge research topic.  Diagnosing the diurnal variations of ecosystem processes (such as photosynthesis) can provide insights into direct interactions between ecosystem processes and controlling factors, which otherwise would be obscured by aggregating the instantaneous variables to daily or seasonal scales.
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Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One paper from Dr. Benjamin D. Stocker (doi: 10.1111/nph.15123) attracted my attention strongly. They quantified the impacts of soil moisture on light use efficiency across biomes by separating the effect from VPD and greenness changes. Their study reveals substantial impacts of soil moisture alone that reduce GPP by up to 40% at sites located in sub-humid, semi-arid or arid regions. Their findings underline the importance of accounting for soil moisture effects on terrestrial primary productivity in addition to VPD. In subsequent studies, several researchers have disentangled the relative effects of VPD and soil moisture  on vegetation productivity.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
My life is very simple. Especially since the epidemic, I have spent most of time in the office and dormitory. The only fun for me is cooking. I'm good at cooking traditional Sichuan food (numbing and spicy).
 

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, being an ecohydrologist means being a naturalist at heart. You wonder about how things work when you’re out and about, hiking in the woods, climbing a mountain, paddling a canoe. Ecohydrology has also been an academic refuge for me, where I can use the skills that I picked up from engineering to study the wonders of nature. “Water and ecosystems” seems as big a label as you would want, if you wandered into this field through odd paths. Later, ecohydrology also became a kind of camouflage. You can insinuate yourself into the company of people from all areas of expertise, because so many things in the world intersect with water. 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
I have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Biology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Duke University. 

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As an undergrad, I spent a lot of time building robots and designing things like battery charging mats for electric cars. At the same time, I also spent quite a bit of time outdoors, backpacking in the Sierra Nevada, or roaming around tropical forests in Australia on a study abroad program. These paths didn’t seem like they could converge until I found “ecohydrology” in grad school – where I could apply the first principles in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics to studying not cars or HVAC systems, but ecosystems. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Since moving to Minnesota, I’ve expanded my ecohydrology lens in two ways: to appreciate the importance of cold climate hydrology (something that I never had to think much about in seasonally dry ecosystems, which was the topic of my Ph.D. and postdoc), and to study ecohydrology in urban settings (which intersects with people’s lived experiences). I’ll elaborate on the first. 
Snow is a huge part of life and water resources here. It also happens that a lot of these colder, perennially inundated watersheds (that contain peatlands) are transitioning from being a carbon sink to a potential carbon source, so snow hydrology both impacts and is impacted by climate change. Snow and frost complicate the timing of when water is available for plant water uptake. They also mediate how the water table regulates greenhouse gas emissions from these watersheds. It’s a complicated and timely problem. 

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My wonderful Ph.D. adviser, Amilcare Porporato, sent me a paper by Gaby Katul, himself, and Ram Oren titled “Stochastic Dynamics of Plant-Water Interactions” (2007, Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, vol. 38, 767-791) as an introduction to ecohydrology and his particular mode of inquiry. This was me straight out of college, so I didn’t appreciate the depth of the paper at the time, but I’ve since returned to it time and time again throughout my Ph.D. and even now. 
This paper highlights the different timescales over which plant-environmental interactions can manifest, and the fallacy of averages when it comes to extrapolating plant responses across temporal and spatial scales. These ideas were, and still are, important, when long-term monitoring data are becoming increasingly popular and available, for thinking about how we use these data and what they mean. Even now, when I think about “plant water use strategies” or “optimal” stomatal conductance, I revisit these ideas – to place plant responses in the environmental contexts in which they occur. 
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What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
To decompress from work, I read, cook, and watch a bunch of TV shows – these also help me stay connected to my extended family in China and Japan. The things that really fire me up are when I get to spend time outside. Since grad school, as a bargain with myself, I make it a goal every year to get unplugged in the wilderness somewhere for a week. The picture above is from when I hydro-geeked out over the Continental Divide in 2019. 

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​Jesse Hahm, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Trying to understand the coupled water and carbon cycles through hydrology-tinted glasses by asking how plants both mediate and respond to hydrologic processes.
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What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I got a BA in philosophy from McGill University, MSc in Geology from the University of Wyoming, and PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I was very fortunate to be able to pursue my graduate studies with one foot in a geoscience department and the other in an integrated biology department. I also benefitted immensely from being able to work at two different Critical Zone Observatories (the Southern Sierra and the Eel), where field work was being pursued by teams of hydrologists and plant ecophysiologists working together to try to understand the critical zone. I specifically got hooked on ecohydrology when my PhD advisor confronted me with a landscape-scale puzzle: why, in an area of similar climate, did two very different plant communities exist side by side? There was a clue that geology seemed to be important, but it took a lot of digging to understand how rock type was controlling plant water availability in soil and bedrock.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Although we’ve known for decades that plants can use water from bedrock, it’s now becoming clear that this phenomenon is widespread and essential for understanding plant community distribution and sensitivity to drought. A big outstanding knowledge gap is our ability to predict how bedrock water storage capacity varies across landscapes, and why. I’m excited to see the next generation of ecohydrologists combining field datasets with remote sensing and working with geomorphologists and geochemists to advance theories to explain how the subsurface critical zone evolves over million-year timescales.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I find myself returning time and again to Scholander and colleagues’ 1965 paper in Science that introduced the now widely used pressure chamber technique for measuring plant water potential (‘Sap Pressure in Vascular Plants’). The ability to measure the tension of the water column inside plants—and relate it to their environment—continues to amaze me. Furthermore, Scholander wrote in an engaging, almost casual style that Is nevertheless precise and credible…I wish I could write like that
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Hiking and mountain biking with family and friends (human and canine), gardening, and house renovations.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To me, ecohydrology means: placing water into Douglas Adams’ “Total Perspective Vortex” (TPV) and sharing the experience. No doubt this requires some explanation ;) The TPV is a fictional invention described by Adams in his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The machine could extrapolate “the whole of reality” from whatever was placed before its lens. Although the scientist in Adams’ book, Trin Tragula, used a crumb of cupcake for his extrapolation, an ecohydrologist would do well to place water before its lens, then stare and share the resulting insights. After all, what doesn’t water contain or sustain in ecosystems? 

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
I began with a bachelors in Environmental Science and English. Then, I pursued a masters in Environmental Science and Policy and another in Geography. Finally, I earned a philosophical doctorate in Environmental Geography, focusing on how plant canopies intercept, re-distribute, and compositionally alter precipitation.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I began in hydrology. Eventually, I felt that the field of hydrology had very little wonder about nature. Instead, it seemed to have a lot of interest in controlling nature - controlling water, at least. Water engineering is important, but ameliorating or preventing water issues requires both engineering solutions and reconnecting our modern communities to a personal interest in water. Believing that the latter comes from sowing seeds of wonder harvested from basic research, I left various water engineering questions behind and began discussing water phenomena with ecologists and biogeochemists and such. We’d chat about phenomena that gave me wonder and caused me to care about understanding water… like how droplets of rain holding onto leaves can shine with an amber glow in the setting sun (i.e., chromophoric dissolved organic matter). These discussions led me to start placing drops of water (usually after they’ve hit some part of a plant) into the Total Perspective Vortex!

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’m very enthusiastic about a certain topic: how plant canopies intercept and route rain, snow, fog, dew, etc. (precipitation partitioning by vegetation). Despite this topic being of great interest to early natural philosophers, like Thales of Miletus, Theophrastus, and Pliny the Elder, we have paid little attention to it since the dawn of modern science (mostly because these interactions are difficult to measure well). But, canopy-precipitation interactions are often the beginning of various paths that precipitation takes through terrestrial systems. Thus, if we get it wrong there, we may propagate our errors into our understanding/modeling of all proceeding water-related natural phenomena.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I really enjoyed working through the old paper “Der Wald und die Quellen” from the poet-forester, Carl Eduard Ney. It’s written in old school German and my quest to digest it required help from my German friends (Jan Friesen and Johanna Metzger) and family (mostly my saint-of-a-wife, Stefanie). Ney shares a unique view of early forest ecohydrological measurements and understanding - during a time where technological and numerical capabilities were limited just enough to inspire clever, simple solutions for gaining valuable field insights. Ney was also the first person, in the written record, to start measuring the water that runs down tree trunks (stemflow) during rain, snow, rhyme, and even dewfall. His poetic wonder about nature really comes through! I hope that we in the forest ecohydrological community will remember his contributions.
Der Wald und die Quellen; Published by F. Pietzcker: Tübingen, Germany, 1893; https://www.google.com/books/edition/Der_Wald_und_die_Quellen/xOe2Ut4H3r0C?hl=en

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to write poetry with my sons, make music with other musicians, and record audiobooks… then post them all to YouTube. There is also ample time for doodle snuggles with my doge, Rosco.

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