I’m an Ecologist so it means don’t forget about the water!
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
Zoology and Botany (BA, University of Wisconsin) Ecology (PhD, Duke University)
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Working with Gaby Katul at Duke and studying the coupled ecosystem carbon and water cycles. Taking classes from Amilcare Porporato certainly helped.
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Surface-atmosphere feedbacks. Ecosystems – and their hydrology – impact the atmospheric boundary layer and precipitation events.
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper? Describe/explain.
Recently I’ve enjoyed ‘Correlation-based flux partitioning of water vapor and carbon dioxide fluxes: Method simplification and estimation of canopy water use efficiency’ by Scanlon, Schmidt, and Skaggs (2019, DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.107732). In it, they extend the flux variance similarity (FVS) approach for estimating transpiration and evaporation from eddy covariance measurements to directly calculate water use efficiency, which previously had been a major uncertainty of FVS. This paper helps us understand how ecosystems partition water into transpiration (probably more accurately called ‘evaporation from stomata’) and evaporation from non-stomatal surfaces. These evaporative fluxes respond differently to changes in climate and land use and are critical to understand for a complete understanding of the water cycle.
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
When I’m not a short-order cook for our daughters, I like to go hiking and swimming with the family and I love to bike and ski. My wife, Dr. Amy Trowbridge, has gotten me more and more into biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) fluxes and I’m excited to foreshadow that our next paper will demonstrate that vapor pressure deficit, critical for plant canopy conductance, is also important for BVOC flux.