I’m not sure why I’m continuing with the blog at this point. But I don’t like to abandon things. Just last month, I logged onto my old Neopets account. I had no idea what was going on anymore, but PERSEVERANCE, PEOPLE! I also thought about logging back into my old Runescape account, but I don’t remember the name or the password. I made it in 7th grade, so it’s probably something like Sparklz123. I love(d) glitter.
Right now, I’m in an Ecohydrology class, so I wanted to talk about it on the blog. I feel like maybe writing about ecohydrology will help me understand it better. I fully believe that you don’t understand something unless you can explain it.
So. What is ecohydrology? According to Newman et al. 2006 Water Resources Research, ecohydrology is defined as “how hydrological processes influence distribution, structure, function, and dynamics of biological communities”.
Basically, it is merging ecology and hydrology. Ecology, how organisms are related to each other and their physical surroundings (definition c/o Wikipedia) and Hydrology, the study of water. Hydrology depends a lot on the behavior of organisms, and the behavior of organisms depends a lot on hydrology. Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. 2000 Water Resources Research basically pioneered this field, and they say that the link between the two is soil moisture. It makes sense. Soil moisture can influence what plants are present. Plants can influence how much soil moisture there is. They take up water, but can also prevent evaporation from the soil by increasing ground cover.
In fact, it is evapotranspiration that is a key element of ecohydrology. Just to go over the definitions really quick, evaporation is water loss through vaporization, as water goes from liquid to gas. Transpiration is water loss through plant tissue. It’s hard to separate the two. If you have a patch of land, and can measure how much water is lost, its hard to tell whether the loss is from evaporation or transpiration, the soil or the plant. So they’re combined a lot, into evapotranspiration.
Things don’t exist in a vacuum. Processes aren’t just in one field. Things interact with each other all the time. Ecohydrology takes that into account. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are used instead of reductionist science, where things are in neat little boxes. I’ll talk about ecohydrology more, I promise. This was just meant to be an introduction to the concept. I’ll give more examples of it, and examples of how it is used to address problems and questions. But now I have to go study for my test. But this has been a giant block of words, so here’s a gif of a cute panda bear rolling down a hill. Until next time!
