Professor Naomi Tague is back where it all began – where she got her undergraduate engineering degree at the University of Waterloo – today to present “Animating green stuff in hydrologic models: where we are and what is next” as part of the Water Institute‘s WaterTalks lecture series.
This study looks at the response and potential impacts of drought on urban vegetation, and the ecosystem services it provides to cities – where >50% of the worlds populations resides.
Miller, D.L., Alonzo, M., Roberts, D.A., Tague, C.L., McFadden, J.P. (2020) Drought response of urban trees and turfgrass using airborne imaging spectroscopy, Remote Sensing of the Environment 240, 111646. doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111646
In this study, the RHESSys model is used to study the post response (including potential climate change scenarios) of hydrologic and vegetation dynamics to an Active Management strategy (i.e. shrub clearing as a result of natural revegetation) in an abandoned cropland catchment of the Central Spanish Pyrenees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
