Published in Environmental Research Letters
High elevation headwater catchments are complex hydrological systems that seasonally buffer water and release it in the form of snow and ice melt, modulating downstream runoff regimes and water availability. In High Mountain Asia (HMA), where a wide range of climates from semi-arid to monsoonal exist, the importance of the cryospheric contributions...
Published in Frontiers in Climate
In Southern California cities, urban trees play a vital role in alleviating heat waves through shade provision and evaporative cooling. Trees in arid to semi-arid regions may rely on irrigation, which is often the first municipal water use to be restricted during drought, causing further drought stress. Finding a balance between efficient water use...
Published in Frontiers in Science
Climate change is altering both the supply of and demand for water in ecosystems across the globe. Despite the importance of understanding how ongoing changes in water availability will impact ecosystems, critical measures of tree water use and indicators of tree water stress are lacking. This dissertation uses novel tools and theories to character...
Published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change
Knowledge of the processes and impacts associated with the canopy’s partitioning of rainfall into stemflow (water that drains to the base of tree stems) and throughfall (water that drips through gaps and from canopy surfaces) has expanded in recent years. However, the effect of canopy interactions on the fundamental physical properties of rainwater...
Published in Microbiology Spectrum
Compared with the phyllosphere, bacteria inhabiting bark surfaces are inadequately understood. Based on a preliminary pilot study, our work suggests that microbial populations vary across tree bark surfaces and may differ in relation to surrounding land use. Initial results suggest that stemflow, the water that flows along the bark surface, activel...
Studying the forest subsurface is a challenge because of its heterogeneous nature and difficult access.Traditional approaches used by ecologists to characterize the subsurface have a low spatial representativity. This review article illustrates how geophysical techniques can and have been used to get new insights into forest ecology. Near-surface g...
Published in Environmental Research Letters
Tree rings can reveal long-term environmental dynamics and drivers of tree growth. However, individual ecological drivers of tree growth need to be disentangled from the effects of other co-occurring environmental and climatic conditions in tree rings to examine the histories of stand- to landscape-level ecological processes. Here, we integrate eco...
Published in Frontiers in Microbiology
Biocrusts are ecosystem engineers in drylands and structure the landscape through their ecohydrological effects. They regulate soil infiltration and evaporation but also surface water redistribution, providing important resources for vascular vegetation. Spatially-explicit ecohydrological models are useful tools to explore such ecohydrological mech...
Landscapes receive water from precipitation and then transport, store, mix, and release it, both downward to streams and upward to vegetation. How they do this shapes floods, droughts, biogeochemical cycles, contaminant transport, and the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Because many of the key processes occur invisibly in the subsurfa...
