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Bhavna Arora Talked Ecohydrology and Watersheds with AGU3 min read

by Christina Procopiou on May 16, 2018

Ecology Department Hydrogeology Department Resilient Energy Water Infrastructure

Bhavna Arora is a research scientist within the Energy Geosciences Division and a member of the Ecohydrological Technical Committee for the American Geophysical Union, which celebrates 100 years in 2018. This week the committee featured a conversation with Arora, wherein she described her study of water resource management and contributions to the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area funded by the Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Research.

What does ecohydrology mean to you?
Ecohydrology to me is a synonym for interdisciplinary science of the critical zone.

What are your undergraduate and graduate degrees in? 
My undergraduate degree is in Agricultural & Food Engineering with a specialization in Water Resources Development & Management from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I received my Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary Water Management and Hydrological Science program at Texas A&M University, where I studied the effect of subsurface heterogeneity on preferential transport and biogeochemical processes in porous media.

How did you arrive at working in/thinking about ecohydrology?
As part of my dissertation and postdoctoral work, I have worked extensively on identifying biogeochemical hot moments and their linkages to hydrologic processes such as water table variations and snowmelt events in different terrestrial environments (e.g., municipal landfill, riverine floodplain, arctic tundra). A natural extension of this work seemed to be including ecological dynamics and understanding its linkages to hydrological processes and biogeochemical fluxes both above and below ground.

I got an opportunity to work on these linkages and through an ecohydrology lens as part of the Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Research (BER) funded work on a mountainous headwater catchment in Colorado. As part of this BER-funded Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area at Berkeley Lab, we are focused on determining how perturbations to mountainous watersheds (e.g., floods, drought, early snowmelt) impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. My role in this project is to simulate how changes in the hydrologic cycle, particularly early snowmelt or reduced snowpack, impact vegetation phenology and elemental fluxes to the river using a mechanistic representation of the key processes in an ecosystem model.

What do you see as an important emerging area of ecohydrology?
The integration of natural observatories and controlled testbeds that can collect, interpret, and assimilate ecohydrological, climate and biogeochemical data at multiple scales to build a systems level understanding of the watershed we rely upon. I also see the community growing and combining methods from diverse disciplines, including atmospheric science, micrometeorology, biogeochemisty, molecular biology, mathematics, statistics and advanced computing, and through collaborations across fields. Really, it’s the convergence of these disciplines that’s so exciting.

Do you have a favorite ecohydrology paper?  Describe/explain.
My favorite is “Shifting Dominance Within a Montane Vegetation Community: Results of a Climate-Warming Experiment” by John Harte and Rebecca Shaw. This science article opened up the idea that there is a critical need to change and work together as a community so that we can leverage knowledge from diverse disciplines to understand and predict the implications of shrubification and other plant community shifts that are beyond the range of previously observed variability.

What do you do for fun (apart from ecohydrology)?
I love to travel and explore new corners of the world. Cooking is also a passion and major stress reliever for me.

This article appeared first here. 

News & Events

EGD Postdoc Fellow Receives Young Researcher Presenter Award1 min read

January 21, 2021

Pramod Bhuvankar, an EGD postdoctoral fellow working with research scientist Abdullah Cihan, received a Young Researcher Presenter Award during the 2020 Computational Methods in Water Resources conference in December. His presentation, “Pore-scale simulations of permeability decline in porous media due to fines migration,” described a pore-scale CFD study of clay mobilization in porous media due…

Berkeley Lab Partners with International Collaborators in Geothermal Energy Research1 min read

January 20, 2021

  Scientists from the Energy Geosciences Division have begun working with European partners on three new geothermal research projects through the Department of Energy’s membership in GEOTHERMICA, a transnational consortium that combines the in-country financial resources and research expertise of 15 participating countries to demonstrate and validate novel concepts in geothermal energy use. This marks the…

EESA Senior Scientist Talks Earthquake Building Resilience1 min read

Berkeley Lab senior scientist David McCallen leads a subproject called Earthquake Sim, or EQSIM, for the DOE’s Energy Exascale Computing Project. He is also professor and director of the Center for Civil Engineering Earthquake Research in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. McCallen recently spoke with Scott Gibson of…

EESA Scientist Coauthors New Comprehensive Guide on Removing CO2 from the Atmosphere2 min read

January 18, 2021

Berkeley Lab researchers are working on ways to sequester more carbon in soil, including through agricultural practices. (Credit: Berkeley Lab) Scientists say that any serious plan to address climate change should include carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and policies, which makes the newly launched CDR Primer an especially vital resource, says Berkeley Lab scientist Margaret Torn, one…

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