In this new publication, the authors synthesis reveals an ecohydrology community that is increasingly interdisciplinary, engaged in society‐relevant problems, and that uses new technologies and modelling approaches to accomplish these goals.
Louis Graup Lightning talk
Tague Team Lab member and PhD student Louis Graup presented “Fire and Water: a Spatial Connection” as part of the 2020 UCSB Center for Spatial Studies Spatial Lightning Talks last week. Bringing together speakers from across the UCSB campus and the local community, this annual series of 3-minute lightning talks is designed to enlighten participants on a broad range of spatial topics.
Naomi Tague gives Moore Lecture
Earlier this month, Naomi Tague presented “Animating green stuff in Hydrologic models: Where we are and what is next” as part of the University of Virginia’s Environmental Sciences Department Moore lecture series hosted by Larry Band.
Abstract: Early hydrologic models represented vegetation as a simple parameter that influenced interception and the transpiration of soil water – the green slime approach. The next generation of eco-hydrology models, termed flow and grow models, included vegetation growth in response to water availability, nutrients and climate. The ‘grow’ component of today’s eco-hydrology models ranging from simple empirical relationships to sophisticated physiological approaches that can explore adaptation and disturbance. Added complexity adds realism and allows models to integrate new theory and data – to become ‘virtual laboratories’. Complexity however is also challenge – What ecohydrology models actually do is rarely clear – they are often ‘black boxes’ even to those who design and use them and this opacity reduces credibility and complicates the interpretation of model results For models to be more effective at advancing understanding how how plants, soil, climate and water interact we must improve how we visualize and communicate not only model output but also the underlying theories that are encoded This is a science-communication challenge that can be tackled with new innovations from computer science and statistics, especially in visualization, informatics and human-computer interface design. In this talk I argue that these innovations are essential if we are to realize the potential of ecohydologic models – and more generally provide ways to use evolving knowledge and data. I present a framework to move us toward this goal and several recent examples.
AGU 2019 Representation
At the Dec. 9-13, 2019 AGU conference – Tague Team Lab members along with extended lab friends/collaborators/colleagues, as well as the RHESSys user community were well represented through numerous presentations and posters (listed below).
Naomi Tague – Ecohydrology and Eco-Informatics Linking theory and data to advance learning and discovery (Invited talk, Centennial – SWIRL, Lightning Talks II: Future Water)
Naomi Tague – Forest density reduction impacts on productivity, water use and drought resilience
William Burke – Multiscale Routing – Integrating the Tree-scale Effects of Disturbance into a Watershed Ecohydrologic Model
Janet Choate – Future Mountain: An interactive visualization of people, fire, water and climate in forested landscapes
Louis Graup – Spatial and temporal patterns of summer vegetative water stress resulting from snow drought
Rachel Torres – Estimating urban tree recovery after drought using an eco-hydrologic model parameterized by remote sensing data
Christopher Heckman – The role of sub-surface storage capacities in drought morality patterns along a hillslope in the Sierra Nevada, California
Ryan R Bart – Fuel treatment effects on forest mortality resistance and water yield during drought
Erin J Hanan – Don’t get too comfy: The postburn return of severe fire risk under climate change
Aubrey L Dugger – Assessing the Value of Integrating Remote-Sensing-Based Snow Products into the NOAA National Water Model for Seasonal Water Supply Prediction in the Western U.S.
Ryan Niemeyer – Restoration, Streamflow, and Stakeholder Engagement: Integrating Forest Owner & Manager Input with Hydro-Ecological Simulations
Clare Stephens – Model robustness to climate change: an experiment with the ecohydrologic model RHESSys
Jianning Ren – What Are the Relative Roles of Future Climate Change and Fire Suppression in Changing Wildfire Regime in Central Idaho?
Gabrielle F.S. Boisrame – Restoring a Natural Fire Regime Alters Streamflow, Snowpack, and Storage in a Sierra Nevada Catchment
Rebecca Gustine – Is forest management a safeguard against a climate change-altered wildfire regime in the City of Seattle’s largest source watershed?
Laurence Lin – Evaluating instream restoration effectiveness in reducing nitrogen export from an urban catchment with a coupled data-modeling approach
Taehee Hwang – Nonstationary Hydrologic Behavior in Forested Watersheds Is Mediated by Climate-Induced Changes in Growing Season Length and Subsequent Vegetation Growth
Mohammad Safeeq – Assessment of hydrologic impacts of climate change in the Sierra Nevada: comparisons between radiative change and CO2 fertilization
Ty Brandt – Assessing WRF’s Seasonal Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (QPE) in California’s Sierra Nevada Using the Airborne Snow Observatory
Charles Scaife – Evolution of Stormflow Thresholds in Long-Term Instrumented Catchments
Elizabeth M. B. Doran – Understanding Individual Action in Addressing Harmful Algal Blooms using a Social Ecological Integrated Assessment Model at the Watershed Scale
Jared David Smith – Bayesian Calibration of an Ecohydrological Model to inform Spatial Water Quality Risk Assessment and Green Infrastructure Siting
Chen Xu – Evaluation of ENSO Impact on Hydroclimatic Variability
New publications on modeling the effects of fire on vegetation
In this new publication in Ecological Modelling, the authors address the relationship between ecohydrology and wildfire and the representation of fire effects on vegetation carbon in ecohydrologic models, which requires a fully coupled modeling approach where wildfire and its effects co-evolve with ecohydrologic processes. Here they present the integration of a fire-effects model that is coupled to the distributed ecohydrologic model RHESSys and the fire-spread model WMFire.
Coupling fire spread with ecohydrology to simulate future fire regimes
Last week, Tague Team Lab friend and collaborator Maureen Kennedy (Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Tacoma) presented “Projecting future fire regimes and watershed dynamics requires coupling fire spread with ecohydrology” at the 8th International Fire Ecology and Management Congress in Tuscon, Arizona. Preliminary results were presented from the coupled WMFire fire spread/RHESSys Hydro-Ecological model used to evaluate which watershed ecosystem services and fire regime characteristics are most sensitive to dimensions of climate change.
Kennedy, M.C., Bart, R., Tague, C.L., McKenzie, D. (2019) Projecting future fire regimes and watershed dynamics requires coupling fire spread with ecohydrology, Association for Fire Ecology: 8th International Fire Ecology and Management Congress, Nov. 18-22, 2019, Tuscon, Arizona.
New Publication: does forest thinning enhance the activity & growth of remaining trees?
In this new publication, the authors conducted a large-scale thinning experiment in a semi-arid pine afforestation in the Yatir forest, located at the northern edge of the Negev desert, Israel. RHESSys was also used to upscale tree-scale measurements.
Ty Brandt PhD Dissertation Defense
New WRR Publication
In this new publication, authors Gabrielle Boisrame, Sally Thompson, Naomi Tague, and Scott Stephens use RHESSys to look at the hydrologic response of a restored fire regime in a basin within Yosemite National Park, California.
Tague presentation at Gordon Conference
Naomi Tague recently presented “Animating Green Stuff in Hydrologic Models: Where We Are and What Is Next?” at the Gordon Research Conference – Catchment Science: Interactions of Hydrology, Biology and Geochemistry, Transcending the Uniqueness of Place in the Age of Big Data, June 23-28 at Proctor Academy in Andover, NH.
