Ecohydrology
Complementing the work on snowmelt, recharge, and streamflow, WEO has long been a location where researchers use novel methods to understand where plants obtain water, their susceptibility to climate and drought stress and their distribution across the landscape. For example, early work showed that riparian trees do not use stream water (Dawson & Ehleringer, 1991; Oerter et al., 2019) leading to decades of work around the globe on understanding plant water sources. More recently, experimental plot-based studies, observations in natural forest stands, and landscape modeling are demonstrating how plant physiology interacts with local to regional climate to control dormancy, growth, carbon allocation, and drought stress (Chan & Bowling, 2017; Zenes et al., 2020). Analysis of high-resolution LiDAR data has illustrated how human land use decisions interact with local hydroclimate to influence both demography and productivity of riparian vegetation across the wildland to urban land use gradient (Grijseels et al., in review).