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MEET A LEAF: J. RENEE BROOKS

4/15/2019

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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. 
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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. 
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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: 
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MEET A LEAF: JONATHAN MARTIN

4/8/2019

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

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MEET A LEAF: Jeremy Littell

6/4/2018

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.Jeremy Littell is a Research Ecologist / Lead Scientist  (Climate Impacts) with the US Geological Survey and Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I’m interested in the ways climate change and climate variability affect landscapes, mainly through fire and vegetation change. These require multi-scale understanding of global-to-local gradients of water and energy to which plants and fuels response, and ecohydrology is the best framework for doing that because it can clearly and simultaneously account for both the ecological responses to hydrological variations and the hydrological responses to ecological variation.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in terrestrial ecology and graduate degrees in land resources and environmental science and something presumptuously titled “forest ecosystem analysis”.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
I got my start trying to figure out how an uncommonly diverse assemblage of desert rodents responded to episodic pulses of water (El Niño years) and drought (La Niña Years), but it didn’t occur to me then that was anything other than pure Hutchinsonian ecology. Being a liability-minded kind of guy and generally watching out for me, my undergraduate adviser suggested I give up on rodents and look at trees, because you don’t catch hanta virus from trees. I had the good fortune to land a master’s project doing tree-ring based fire history in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where subalpine forests give way to lower elevation Douglas-fir woodlands. In that system, to understand why fires manifest as relatively rare crown fires in subalpine forest and more frequent fires in the lower elevation forests, it helps greatly to think about the energy and water balances that drive the vegetation and fuels there. The role of drought is a richer scientific endeavor if we think of drought not as an index relative to a mean, but instead a continuous process. It scales more easily that way. And that leads to thinking of fire as an ecohydrological process. Another observation that queued up ecohydrology, though I didn’t know the word at the time, was that the Douglas-fir in that system put on early wood (the light part of a tree ring) in spring and early summer, and then unlike their well-watered cousins in the western Cascades, they transition fairly abruptly to late wood (the dark part of a tree ring) and then quickly go dormant. The key to understanding the regional difference in ring formation is the seasonal timing of snowmelt and subsequent potential evapotranspiration (PET) that exceeds the water available for actual evapotranspiration (AET). I found out about this in the ecological literature, but quickly discovered that hydrologists (or at least some hydrologists) were used to thinking about those differences from the perspective of “Where’d the water go?, not “Why do the plants do what they do?”.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Because it provides a quantitative and predictive approach to understanding the fluxes of water and energy in vegetation, ecohydrology can play an important role in developing realistic scenarios of climate change impacts on ecosystems. I think this is especially key where climate variability and climate change interact to drive both the long-term trends but also the extremes to which eocsystems respond. The uncertainty in future landscape trajectories could be considerably reduced by replacing some of the stochastic elements in vegetation models with more deterministic, if complex, ecoydrological gradients. The next logical step is trialing adaptation options in forests based on ecohydrology knowledge of different trajectories in different parts of landscapes.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Around 2004, I spent longer than I want to admit to this community on “A scale invariant coupling of plants, water, energy and terrain”, (Milne, Gupta, and Restrepo, Ecoscience, 2002) because it seemed to provide a key framework for my attempts to explain both variation in tree growth responses in mountain landscapes AND fire responses to climate across the western U.S.. It hinted at the ability to go from processes affecting a single tree to those affecting the fuels in an entire ecoregion, and for me, that scale invariance was transformative in my thinking. I still don’t think I have adequately linked what I study and publish on to those concepts, but I’ve spent a decade trying to create the historical and future variables described in that paper for my own purposes. That has been both productive and entertaining.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I Nordic ski race in winter, and train for skiing in the summer by mountain running, roller skiing, and other pursuits not considered odd in Scandinavia, and increasingly less odd in Alaska. I have no TV, a few bikes, and I prefer not to discuss how many pairs of skinny skis are in my garage. In my defense, they are not all mine, but that is in part because if my family didn’t ski, they would probably see less of me. Some people restore cars in their garages; I wax skis. Lots and lots of skis. I also have a garden that I chase moose out of regularly. One of the benefits of all that skiing and running is eating, so I cook a lot too – for my wife and me, food is entertainment, though I am not sure our two daughters always agree with that. There is an infinite amount of fun to be had in Alaska, as long as you recognize occasionally you’ll be wet and cold. But ecohydrologists know about that, right?!
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MEET A LEAF: BHAVNA ARORA

5/14/2018

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​Bhavna Arora is a Research Scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She currently serves as the lead for the Biogeochemical Cycling Group within the Energy Geosciences Division.
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What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me is a synonym for interdisciplinary science of the critical zone.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
My undergraduate degree is in Agricultural & Food Engineering with a specialization in Water Resources Development & Management from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I received my Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary Water Management and Hydrological Science program at Texas A&M University, where I studied the effect of subsurface heterogeneity on preferential transport and biogeochemical processes in porous media.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As part of my dissertation and postdoctoral work, I have worked extensively on identifying biogeochemical hot moments and their linkages to hydrologic processes such as water table variations and snowmelt events in different terrestrial environments (e.g., municipal landfill, riverine floodplain, arctic tundra). A natural extension of this work seemed to be including ecological dynamics and understanding its linkages to hydrological processes and biogeochemical fluxes both above and below ground.

I got an opportunity to work on these linkages and through an ecohydrology lens as part of the Department of Energy’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) funded work on a mountainous headwater catchment in Colorado. Here, as part of this BER-funded Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area at the Berkeley Lab, we are focused on determining how perturbations to mountainous watersheds (e.g., floods, drought, early snowmelt) impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. My role in this project is to simulate how changes in the hydrologic cycle, particularly early snowmelt or reduced snowpack, impact vegetation phenology and elemental fluxes to the river using a mechanistic representation of the key processes in an ecosystem model.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The integration of natural observatories and controlled testbeds that can collect, interpret, and assimilate ecohydrological, climate and biogeochemical data at multiple scales to build a systems level understanding of the watershed we rely upon. I also see the community growing and combining methods from diverse disciplines, including atmospheric science, micrometeorology, biogeochemisty, molecular biology, mathematics, statistics and advanced computing, and through collaborations across fields. Really, it's the convergence of these disciplines that’s so exciting.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite is “Shifting Dominance Within a Montane Vegetation Community: Results of a Climate-Warming Experiment” by John Harte and Rebecca Shaw. This science article opened up the idea that there is a critical need to change and work together as a community so that we can leverage knowledge from diverse disciplines to understand and predict the implications of shrubification and other plant community shifts that are beyond the range of previously observed variability.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to travel and explore new corners of the world. Cooking is also a passion and major stress reliever for me.
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