​Paul Brooks is a Professor of Hydrology and Biogeochemistry in the Department of Geology and Geophysics and Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Utah. 

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. J. Renée Brooks is a Research Ecohydrologist with the US Environmental Protection Agency at the Western Ecology Division in Corvallis Oregon.  The Western Ecology Division is in the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory within the Office of Research and Development. 

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I like to think of ecohydrology as following water molecules through ecosystems, with all the complicated interactions and pathways that happen along the way.  What are they doing, where are they going, and what does that mean to the ecosystem?  As a discipline, ecohydrology has allowed my research to flow naturally from canopy to roots and soils to groundwater systems into rivers streams and lakes.  As someone who conducts research for a regulatory agency, this freedom within a research discipline means my research can move to meet the needs of the EPA. 
​
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was at the University of Georgia in the School of Forestry majoring in Forest Hydrology with John. D. Hewlett.  My Master’s and PhD were from College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington, specializing in Tree physiology under the guidance of Tom Hinckley, who brought me up into forest canopies, literally.  My postdoctoral experience at the University of Utah with Jim Ehleringer opened the world of stable isotopes in ecology to me.  All of these experiences have been critical components to becoming an ecohydrologist.  

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Camping trips in Oregon in my youth exposed me to the dramatic changes water can induce in tree size from the coastal rain forest to inland deserts. I remember canoe trips in Florida as a high school student and being fascinated by cypress knees.  This exposure to how water influenced plant growth led to a life-long fascination with trees and water, and led me on the educational path I outlined above.  The word Ecohydrology came along much later, and I remember thinking “Oh yeah! That describes what I do!”. 

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I am struggling to pinpoint just one area, as I think of declining snowpacks and the influence on surface water, but I am going to focus on nutrient pollution issues, and transport of water through the critical zone.  Within EPA’s regulatory interests, the transport of nutrients from soils to groundwater and surface waters is a tremendous challenge governing non-point source pollution.  A key part of this is understanding various pools of water and how they interact and reside within soils, and transport nutrients.  The more we look into this issue, the more complicated yet fascinating it is.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
I am going to pick a paper that was revolutionary to me during my graduate school days:
Jarvis, P. G., and K. G. McNaughton. 1986. Stomatal control of transpiration: scaling up from leaf to region. Advances in Ecological Research 15:1-49.
Jarvis and McNaughton tackled the conflicting views of plant physiologists who felt stomata were the key to transpiration, and micrometeorologists who felt stomata were inconsequential to transpiration fluxes.  They explain the Omega Factor, and the idea of scale and canopy coupling to explain the conflicting views.  Micrometeorologists working on transpiration often measured transpiration above uniform crop canopies that were not coupled to the surrounding atmosphere, which diminished the role of stomata on transpiration.  Plant physiologists measured transpiration at the leaf and eliminated the boundary layer around the leaf for their measurements, thus the role of stomata was central to the measured fluxes.  This paper was a wonderful way to unite the two views, and opened my eyes to the influence of a researcher’s perspective to the conclusions they draw.  Merging the views of two disciplines is another powerful feature of ecohydrology as a discipline: you learn to see things through more than one lens. 

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I like to sculpt things.  My favorite medium is pumpkins: I carve one every year for Halloween, and spend 10 or more hours doing it.  Here is my 2017 pumpkin when the total eclipse passed over Oregon.  The pumpkin’s name is Totality: 

Jonathan Martin works in the private consulting industry as a watershed hydrologist at Dudek environmental.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Quoting (misquoting?) previous leafs, ecohydrology is the integration of multiple physical/chemical relationships used to characterize and quantify water’s movement through soil, plant, and the hydrosphere. But for me personally (who functions primarily as a hydrologist), ecohydrology really boils down to wrapping my brain around how plant physiology controls the flux of moisture from soil to atmosphere, and this is largely due to the lack of plant biology in my academic years so I frequently find myself banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what’s driving the variability within and between plants. That said, ecohydrology is also an excellent tool for getting hydrologists and engineers to pull out their hair when they discover things like xylem embolism or variable stomata functioning with temperature.  

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree was in Geography (minor in Geology) from Northern Arizona University (2000), while my master’s degree was in Ecohydrology and Watershed Management from the University of Arizona (2009). The six years betwixt my educations were spent as a seamstress.   

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Loving the Sonoran Desert, but conflicted with its growing population and dwindling water resources, I enrolled in a wonderful program through The University of Arizona’s Cooperative Extension called Master Watershed Stewards (2005). This opened the door to the University of Arizona’s graduate program in Ecohydrology and Watershed Management where the likes of Dr. Papuga and Dr. Breshears thoroughly stretched the capabilities of this brain and introduced me to this soil-plant-atmosphere relationship. Although I worked specifically in urban heat island research, my coursework and assistance with other staff in Papuga’s Lab landed me a job in Southern California Dudek’s hydrogeology division where they were wanting to expand their toolset in developing water balances by quantifying plant water demands. I’ve been on this steep and fulfilling learning curve ever since.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
I’ve only lived in the foothills of the Sierras for two years, but the theme between June and November appears to be smoke and fear. With my regional bias I think ecohydrology can play an important role in the ongoing modeling of ecosystem responses to climate change, ideally improving our ability to prioritize forest management resources.

More closely related to my work in the private sector note, California’s recent Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is requiring that groundwater basins identify and preserve groundwater dependent ecosystems; developing simple and cost-effective tools/methods for assessing the health of said ecosystems may help increase the number of groundwater agencies implementing such monitoring programs.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Yeah, and it’s by a former leaf-er! Steven Loheide, James Butler, and Steven Gorelick’s 2005 Estimation of Groundwater Consumption by Phreatophytes Using Diurnal Water Table Fluctuations: A Saturated-Unsaturated Flow Assessment (Water Resources Research Vol 41). I was tasked with quantifying the daily discharge from a spring complex. Surface flow was easy enough, but ET on-a-budget was going to be tricky. Thankfully we had a piezometer at a location in the spring that was no longer under artesian pressure, and this method (modified White method) was glorious. It also helped that Dr. Loheide was magnanimous in answering the bombardment of disorganized questions I threw at him (but so far everybody I’ve reached out to has been wonderful. Keep it up!).
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
This is getting too intimate. I will limit it to three items.
1. Geriatric Hip-Hop Dance Group (although I’m the oldest at 41, everybody else is probably mad I’m calling it geriatric)
2. Rehabilitate tendinosis in my right elbow (be smarter when climbing on aging/expanding bodies)
3. Get my butt kicked by Gaia (it is not a true vacation unless you come back physically weary from clambering around some remote wilderness where you’re not concerned about whether or not your water purification system is able to treat the rodenticide from a rogue marijuana grove upstream or if your children are within a suitable distance so as not to serve as mountain lion food).

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

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

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I still treat hydrology as a reference point to understand the importance of ecohydrology. And that’s what ecohydrology is to me – expanding our understanding of hydrology by taking into account the biophysical processes in a system. To me, personally, being an ecohydrologist (as opposed to a hydrologist) has allowed me to see the relevance of what we do beyond water resources to other implications such as carbon balance and system stability.     

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

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

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

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

Dr. Mauricio E. Arias is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
Website: watershedsustainability.org
Twitter: @WaSusResearch

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I like to think of Ecohydrology in a broad interdisciplinary sense: it is the field that seeks to understand the interactions and feedbacks between the hydrological cycle and ecological processes.

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

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

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

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

​Dr. David D. Breshears ("Dave") is a Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, jointly affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the Ecological Society of America.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JQOZ4cUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Twitter: @DaveBreshears   

Dr. Zulia Mayari Sanchez Mejia is an Associate Professor in the Water Science and Environment Department at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora (ITSON) in Sonora, Mexico.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kelly Caylor is the Director of the Earth Research Institute and is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Bren School of Environmental Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. Twitter: @kcaylor