Dr. Tonantzin Tarin is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Plant & Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology is the interaction of biological processes (and organisms) with the water cycle, in terms of use, transport and storage of water.
 
What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I started my scientific career at the Sonoran Institute of Technology (ITSON) with Professor Enrico Yépez. My bachelors and masters theses focused on studying evapotranspiration partitioning using stable isotopes and ecosystems flux measurements in the Sonoran desert of northwestern México. During that time, I also had the experience of working with Professor Enrique R. Vivoni working on hydrological models at Arizona State University. These experiences gave me the motivation to pursue a doctoral degree in vegetation dynamics and the carbon and water cycles of semi-arid terrestrial ecosystems.

My Ph.D. research encompassed the study of two iconic semi-arid ecosystems of central Australia: a woodland and a savanna ecosystem (both evergreen ecosystems). I have been fortunate to investigate varying spatial-scales, ranging from leaf to whole ecosystems contrasting (i) plant physiological strategies of co-occurring species, (ii) water-use efficiency, (iii) the stomatal optimization theory and related models. I used eddy covariance data to explore at the ecosystem scale, the relationships among net ecosystem productivity and evapotranspiration with water availability, meteorological variables and vegetation dynamics. At leaf scale, I have studied resource-use efficiencies of multiple co-existing tree species (water-use efficiency, light-use efficiency, and carbon and nitrogen-use efficiencies). These studies combined both intense fieldwork data collection and laboratory analyses across different seasons.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Water. It all started with water. Water is a big issue in my hometown in Sonora as it is a problem in many places around the world. My time at ITSON gave me the opportunity to work and engage in conversations with a group of exceptional hydrologists such as Dr. Jaime Garatuza and Dr. Enrique R. Vivoni, Dr. Julio Rodrigo, and Dr. Christopher Watts. Intense fieldwork campaigns in the Sonora desert brought the relationships among plants, water, and carbon to my attention. Plants can do a lot with a tiny amount of water and become highly productive when water is available, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. By assessing contrasting eco-hydrological behaviors in dominant plant species under field conditions, we can improve our understanding of ecosystem-scale carbon and water fluxes.
 
What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
As I mentioned, water is a scare resource especially in semi-arid regions. We need to understand water movement, transport, and use. Societies must be more efficient about water-use and be able to track the water cycle’s components in order to estimate better budgets for better practices and management. Plants can tell us a lot about these concerns! Plants have evolved extreme capabilities for water-use, movement and storage. Additionally, there is an important feedback between vegetation and local climate, for example via evapotranspiration and we should be able to quantify at different scales. Likewise, there is a need of understanding how plants are coping with a changing environment. An improved understanding of current and future eco-hydrological processes is a central component to progress in the development of programs for ecosystem adaptation and mitigation in the face of a changing environment, especially global hydrological change. I think that by studying functional ecological attributes in plants and entire ecosystems (or basin-scale), we will contribute to refining water management in any given region.
 
Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
One of my favorite papers is entitle “Linking plant and ecosystem functional biogeography” by Markus Reichstein and colleagues (2014). This publication highlights the need to understand plant traits in order to better explain the variation and uncertainties in biogeochemical processes and climate. The paper pointed out interesting needs and current technologies to address questions related to vegetation interactions with land-surface processes. This paper is also highly motivating and encourages collaborative efforts among scientists of different fields to achieve common goals when investigation biogeosciences’ processes. 
  
Reichstein, M., Bahn, M., Mahecha, M.D., Kattge, J., Baldocchi, D.D. (2014). Linking plant and ecosystem functional biogeography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 111, 13697-13702.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I really enjoy being outdoors and training as much as I can. Running has been a good way to explore new areas around my current location(s) as I move between countries and now being a postdoc in the USA. 

Dr. Brent Newman is a scientist in the Earth & Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
An appreciation of the connections between physical and biological processes affecting the movement and availability of water and/or the functioning of plants.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I received my BS and MS degrees in Geology from Central Michigan University and the University of Texas at El Paso, respectively. I started doing groundwater hydrology work during my MS. My Ph.D. is in Geochemistry from New Mexico Tech, and during my Ph.D. work I started focusing more on vadose zone hydrology and the ecohydrology of Ponderosa Pine forests and Piñon-Juniper woodlands. During these studies, I started working a lot with environmental tracers especially stable isotopes and chloride. I still use various environmental tracer approaches even though I am working more in Arctic and tropical systems.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
Over the years I have had a lot of close interactions with really good ecologists at Los Alamos which I hope rubbed off a bit. Working early on in semiarid systems also emphasized the importance of physical and biological connections. By the time I finished my Ph.D it was really apparent that there was little communication between hydrologists and ecologists and several of us started to work on bridging this gap. In 2000, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe wrote an editorial in Water Resources Research about the need for an ecohydrological science perspective which greatly spurred interest in doing more interdisciplinary research. In 2002, Brad Wilcox, Osvaldo Sala, and I convened an AGU Chapman conference on Ecohydrology and we had a really great group of prominent “ecologists” and “hydrologists” at the meeting. During the conference it was clear that the two camps had some difficulties in communicating and sometimes had different approaches in terms of how they did their science. The outcome of that meeting was a series of papers in the journal Ecology, but also many ecohydrological collaborations were started that are still going on today. It is exciting that since that time Ecohydrology has really become much more mature and visible as a science. I know I am missing some things here, but there have been two more AGU Chapman ecohydrology conferences, a series of HydroEco conferences in Austria, and the establishment of the journals Ecohydrology, and Ecohydrology and Hydrobiology.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
Linking biogeochemical cycling (including microbes) with more “traditional” plant-water ecohydrological processes.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite ecohydrology paper is Zimmerman et al. (1968). It is a somewhat overlooked paper, but is a great piece of experimental science and was the first one to show lack of fractionation of stable isotopes (d18O and d2H) by plants during root water uptake. It really enabled the use of stable isotopes as ecohydrological tracers.  The paper is not hard to find and you can always get it through the IAEA Water Resources Programme website.

Zimmermann, U., D. Ehhalt, and K.O. Munnich. 1968. Soil-water movement and evapotranspiration: Changes in the isotopic composition of the water. p. 567–584. In Isotopes in Hydrology, Proc. Symp., Vienna. March 1967. IAEA, Vienna.
 
What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
Ski in winter, flyfish in summer, and brew ciders and beer in between.

Dr. Femeena Pandara Valappil recently defended her PhD at Purdue University and joined the consulting firm BAI Group Inc. in State College, PA as an Engineer. 

Dr. Huade Guan is an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Groundwater Research & Training, College of Science & Engineering, Flinders University, Australia.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
To my mind, ecohydrology means the study of interactive processes on land surface that involve both plants and water, their influences on water resources, carbon fluxes, and heat balances, and their responses to environmental changes. As vegetation occurs almost everywhere on the terrestrial surfaces, ecohydrology has broad applications in the management of terrestrial resources and environments, such as water resources, forests, agriculture, and urban environment. 

Physical processes that are investigated in ecohydrology form the core of land surface and atmosphere interactions. Thus, ecohydrology is closely associated with, and often difficult to be distinguished from hydrometeorology. My research area covers both ecohydrology and hydrometeorology. We actually have an acronym for my research group -- EcoH2OMe.

Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary research field. Hydrology and ecophysiology are two obvious important disciplines for ecohydrology. Breadth of knowledge and skills, and cross-discipline research collaborations, are likely more rewarding for ecohydrology than other research fields.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I have an undergraduate degree in geochemistry from Peking University, Master’s degree in groundwater from the University of Texas at El Paso, and PhD degree in mountain hydrology from New Mexico Tech. I am happy with the breadth of training I have received in these degrees. My research in ecohydrology has greatly benefited from this training, as well as other knowledge and skills that I picked up on the way of my research until now.

For students in any field of science, if you don’t know yet what to do, come study ecohydrology.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
My interest in ecohydrology started at New Mexico Tech, where I did my PhD study with Dr John Wilson. I initially applied for a PhD study at New Mexico Tech mainly because of Tech’s groundwater hydrology ranking (the 4th in 2000). But it seemed that groundwater research at Tech was “surfacing” at that time. John started to look at mountain front recharge, which became my PhD study subject. Dr Fred Phillips was investigating vegetation impacts on groundwater recharge. Two young professors at New Mexico Tech then, Dr Eric Small and Dr Enrique Vivoni, were very active in ecohydrology research.

The landscape surrounding Socorro also helped to shape my interest in ecohydrology. I was fascinated by the clear grass-creosote and creosote-juniper boundaries in Sevilleta, although this was not the focus of my PhD study.

The key driver, pushing me away from hydrogeologically investigating mountain front recharge towards using surface-based approaches (including ecohydrology), was the difficulty in obtaining subsurface data. My PhD study ended up with developing methods to quantify the atmospheric boundary conditions (including both precipitation, potential evaporation and transpiration) over complex terrains, and modelling water partitioning on hillslopes. Development of a dual-source surface energy partitioning model in my PhD study at Tech was probably my first ecohydrology-related research.

I started field-based ecohydrology research in 2010, a couple years after I joined Flinders University.  My students and I investigated the soil-plant continuum with concurrent measurements of sapflow and stem water potential. We hope to characterize root zone and plant hydraulic properties and states based on both measurements, like observation wells and pumping tests in groundwater hydrology. This concept, which I now call “root zone periscope”, has been applied to test and develop root water uptake and transpiration models. The computer program of a vegetation-focused soil-plant-atmosphere model (vSPAC) is now available upon request.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
This is a difficult question. Perhaps the recent ecohydrological separation concept, first proposed by Brooks et al. (2010) in Nature Geoscience, could be one emerging area. Dr Fred Phillips made clear and concise comments on the potential significance of this concept from both theoretical and application aspects, including the implications for catchment hydrology, fertilizer application, and soil remediation.

Understanding and modelling the connections between physical processes and plant mechanistic processes in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum could be another emerging area. Such understanding and modelling capacity are essential to predict vegetation ecosystem responses to changing climates. One example is the recent findings on the impact of the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration on plant stomatal conductance and the consequence on large-scale water balance, published in Nature Climate Change by Dr Yuting Yang and Dr Michael Roderick et al. (2018).

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite ecohydrology paper is McDowell et al. 2018, Mechanisms of plant survival and mortality during drought: why do some plants survive while others succumb to drought?  published in New Phytologist. In this paper, the authors proposed a concise conceptual framework to explain the contrasting responses of pinon and juniper in the early 2000s drought in New Mexico. The concept links plant drought response to measurable ecohydrological variables. Based on these measurements, plants can be categorized into isohydric and anisohydric species. An isohydric species is more likely to develop carbon starvation, while an anisohydric species tends to develop hydraulic failure in a drought.

More broadly, I like Kirchner 2009, Catchments as simple dynamical systems: Catchment characterization, rainfall-runoff modeling, and doing hydrology backward, published in Water Resources Research. This paper demonstrates how the catchment water balance components can be resolved based on time series streamflow data only. I find the philosophic support in this paper for my own research approach in ecohydrology – conceptualizing the system in such a way that it can be investigated by easily obtainable data.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
When I have spare time, I like to walk and listen to music. But I don’t know much about music. A student once found that I kept listening to the same couple of songs for a whole semester! 

Dr. Lizzie Gardner is an Aquatic Ecologist at the global independent design, engineering and architectural firm, Arup and a Postgraduate Research Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Dr. Scott Allen is a post doctoral scholar at ETH Zurich (and soon to be at the University of Utah).

Dr. Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe is Distinguished University Professor and TEES Eminent Professor in the Departments of Ocean Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is also J.S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor (Emeritus) at Princeton University.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
I am at heart a hydrologist who loves ecology in all its manifestations, thus I think for me ecohydrology is the science that deals with the hydrologic processes that crucially impact ecologic dynamics on its many manifestations. Obviously this is a wide definition but I like it because it brings hydrology as key player in a wonderful variety of different areas.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in?
I graduated in Civil Engineering from Zulia University in Maracaibo, Venezuela. After that I received my M.Sc. from Caltech in hydraulics and my PhD in hydrology under Prof. Vujica Yevjevich from Colorado State University . Very early in my graduate school I decided that the excitement in research in the water field was going to be in the science aspects that hydrology contained where there were a extremely large number of fundamental questions  being treated empirically under a very limited hydraulic perspective. The “why?” of the many beautiful dynamics of nature related to water was simply being set aside in favor of engineering short-term solutions to specific problems.
 
How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
In the previous questions I answer why did I go into hydrology when the field was still very erroneously considered as an appendix to hydraulics. It was basically because of the beauty of the questions: why river basins look like trees? Why rainfall shows a deep organization from cells to fronts? Why trees in savannas exist in clusters whose sizes have well defined probability distributions? Basically I was fascinated to try to understand the beauty of hydrologic processes through the mysterious and deep organization that I thought should exist behind them. Ecohydrology was very much in my mind since the beginning because two reasons: 1) the importance of the hydrologic dynamics for the life sciences and 2) for the beauty of the questions it brought to my research. I thought about it for many years-I still do!-but my many conversations and blackboard discussions with my admired hydrologist and great friend Peter Eagleson were of fundamental importance. We were interested in different questions but we shared a common approach about what made us “tick” in research. I had been working very intensively with Andrea Rinaldo in hydrogeomorphology and the structure of the drainage network but always kept in my mind the dream of linking that area with ecohydrology. How to do it? If I had to choose one question where to concentrate for a while , what would I choose?  I decided that the variable I would choose to link many of the topics that were in my mind would be soil moisture and its probabilistic structure in space and time. I am still very involved with that topic.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
What drives a lot of my research is to link and unify many different aspects of ecohydrology regardless of the always important local characteristics of the processes involved. From this perspective I am keenly interested in how some key patterns in nature-e.g., river networks, cluster of trees in savannas,etc-whose basic structure transcends scales, result from basic principles associated with hydrologic dynamics and  plays a key role in fundamental areas of ecohydrology.  With this perspective more than a decade ago several of us started to work in the role of river networks as ecological corridors for species, populations and pathogens. A book with this title by Andrea Rinaldo, Marino Gatto, and myself will come out later this year in Cambridge University Press. It intertwines hydrology, ecology, geomorphology, and epidemiology in a topic which I believe will be very exciting in the near future. The role of some natural patterns, like the ones I refer to –networks and clusters- resulting from ecohydrologic dynamics but at the same time serving as templates to study the organization of these dynamics in space and time is for me a crucial challenge ahead. This is my approach to study biodiversity, geochemical cycles,etc.in different types of ecosystems. I am interested in how the geochemical cycles organize in space and time as function of hydrologic dynamics? How this is both cause and consequence of the templates I just mentioned? The role of hydrologic processes in microbial diversity in soils and their space-time dynamics is a very exciting frontier.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
Really I have many favorite papers. Those are the ones that may me think in problems or approaches that are new!  As examples I would name the paper by Peter Eagleson in 1982 in Water Resources Research, “Ecological optimality in water-limited natural soil-vegetation systems”  and a recent one -2017- in Advances in Water Resources by Enrico Bertuzzo et al: “Scaling of dissolved organic carbon removal in river networks”. Both papers are daring in the sense of proposing dynamic principles of general character that go beyond particular aspects related to location or scale. They aim high! The paper by Pete I am sure has been read and re-read by most ecohydrologists. The one by Bertuzzo et al combines the form and scaling of river networks with the removal of dissolved organic carbon to show that the minimization of energy dissipation controlling the scaling structure of the network leads to scaling of the DOC mass flux and a more efficient DOC mass removal per unit stream bed.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I truly have a lot of fun in long walks with Mercedes, my wife, and spending time with our 14 grandchildren! 

​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).