We Measure The World

Mason Stahl is the James M. Kenney Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Geosciences and Environmental Science, Policy and Engineering program. His research spans the fields of hydrogeology, geochemistry and water resources. I study how perturbations to the environment influence elemental cycling and the quality of our water resources. A main focus of my research has been on improving our understanding of the hydrologic and biogeochemical factors that result in the mobilization of naturally occurring arsenic from sediments into groundwater, which is a problem that threatens the health of millions of people around the world. One of the primary goals of my research is to help answer questions about how groundwater and surface water quality will change in response to natural and anthropogenic changes to the environment and what this means for the health of people and the environment.

Ning is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. He obtained his bachelor’s in Geotechnical Engineering at Wuhan University of Technology, and both his master’s and doctorate in Civil Engineering at John Hopkins University. He is well-known internationally for his work on stresses in variably saturated porous media, with his primary research interest in seeking common threads among basic soil physical phenomena, including fluid flow, chemical transport, heat transfer, stress, and deformation.

Erin is an Agricultural Engineer and Professor in the Department of Soil and Water Systems at the University of Idaho. He obtained his bachelors in Agricultural Engineering with a Soil and Water Engineering emphasis at Washington State University, and then went on to get his master’s from the University of Minnesota and doctorate from the University of Idaho, both specializing in Hydrologic Measurement and Modeling. Erin’s current research focuses on the management of ecosystems through the combination of field experiments and modeling.

Saul Alarcon is an agronomist for Gradient Crop Yield Solutions with over 30 years of experience in agriculture. As part of the Morning Star Company, his research into plant health has been instrumental in developing crop models for growers. He obtained his Bachelors in biology with an emphasis in plant health from the Instituto Tecnológico de Los Mochis in Sinaloa, Mexico and recently received his Masters in agronomy from Iowa State University.

Dr. Darren Ficklin is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University. He received his bachelor's in geological sciences at Indiana University, obtained his master's in geology at Southern Illinois University, and a Ph.D. in hydrologic Sciences at the University of California Davis. After completing his Ph.D., he stayed in California and did postdoctoral work at Santa Clara University. His current research focuses primarily on the intersection of hydrology and climate.

Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists...

DARREN FICKLIN 0:07

Yeah. So if you're not familiar with Brood X Cicadas they come out of the ground every 17 years, and these are not, these are not flies. These are several inches in length and a half an inch. So they come out every 17 years, and essentially what happens is when they come out, they leave these gigantic holes in the ground about the size of a dime. And these burrows go about, they can go up to 60 centimeters deep. So they can go relatively deep. So they emerge from the soil. They make their way up the tree, they'll mate on the tree. And then the larvae or nymphs will fall to the ground, dig into the soil, and they stay there for 17 years. So the research question was essentially, how does this how do these burros affect infiltration?

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:57

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today's guest is Darren Ficklin. Darren Ficklin is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Indiana University. He received his bachelor's in geological sciences there at Indiana University and then went on to get his master's in geology at Southern Illinois University and a PhD in hydrologic Sciences at the University of California Davis. After completing his PhD, he stayed in California and did postdoctoral work at Santa Clara University. His current research focuses primarily on the intersection of hydrology and climate. And today he's here to talk about his many research projects into watershed and soil hydrology, climate change, and bugs. So Darren, thanks so much for being here.

DARREN FICKLIN 1:52

Thank you for having me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:55

All right. So yeah, today, we wanted to talk about a few of your projects and research interests. But first, can you tell us a little bit about your background? And, and then how you became involved in hydrology?

DARREN FICKLIN 2:06

Yeah, that's a good question. So I'm, I'm from Indiana, Originally, I'm from about an hour south and I grew up in farmland. And I've always been interested in science. I have no idea why, some of these older, older folks listening may remember, Mr. Wizard, Bill Nye, I watched those all the time. I remember as a young kid, mixing mayonnaise, and ketchup and mustard and making my own chemical, chemical, chemical concentrations there and doing some weird stuff with that. But I've always been interested in science. I don't know really what happened with that. And as I grew older, I got to kind of be in the environment more. And so my dad worked for the USDA NRCS as a soil scientist, specifically what he did is he helped farmers around the region, limit erosion. So that I think that kind of steered me in the direction of the environmental science. And that was, that was essentially I was too young to know what that was. But as I grew up, in high school, I kind of could understand of, you know, what you can do in the environment. I was also really into computers at at the high school, I didn't understand them. In fact, I went to Indiana University, and I was originally a computer science major. And they threw me into a sophomore level course. And I had no idea what I was doing almost immediately. So that was, they threw me in and they were coding on the first day. So I did not understand what computer science was at that age. So I dropped that almost immediately. I talked to the advisor, one of the academic advisors at IU, and they they kind of steered me into this intro introductory geology course. And that was it, that basically, I took off from there, I really, really enjoyed it. And then as I took more and more classes, I took more hydrology classes in the upper levels. And that's really when when I took off as far as I was interested in hydrology, and I think a lot of that stemmed from my, you know, farming background and my dad's work with the USDA.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:15

So, I guess that's kind of fun. This is one of the things that we hear often is that either Yeah, the the folks that are now in their specialties they are quite often didn't start where where they thought or didn't end up where they thought they would end up starting with one thing moving on to another. So going from computer science. So then did with your computer science background, and then geology. So I'm assuming that that GIS then became kind of one of your one of your go twos to connect the two.

DARREN FICKLIN 4:46

Yeah, so at undergraduate I started taking a lot of GIS courses as well. That was junior senior level courses, and specifically they were geological applications in GIS, where you would work on I work on my own erosion processes on a hillslope. That type of stuff really, you know, really kind of kind of gelled everything together. For me the computer science aspect. Yeah, I didn't understand that computer science was coding. At that time, I learned very quickly. I mean, now I can code but I didn't didn't understand it when I was entering the undergraduate curriculum.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:20

Right. Well, let's talk, let's dive into some of your current research and or more recent research. A lot of a lot of what you've been working with, especially within the realm of hydrology is hydrology and Hydroclimatology. And and those kinds of they interplay between between climate change and variability and hydrological processes. Can you get, I guess, how did how did you go from from being, you know, working with? Let me back that up. So how did you come to focus more on on this, this, I guess, this interplay, the integration between climate and hydrology?

DARREN FICKLIN 6:03

Yeah, so my master's was in groundwater, groundwater hydrology, my PhD was in surface hydrology. So a lot of those are treated separately, they should not be treated separately, but a lot of them are treated separately. So that kind of gives me a little more general idea of the hydrological cycle. And as far as climate change goes, that really started when I was out in California, getting my PhD and it really started. You don't I don't realize this and when you're in the Midwest, but California exists because of its snowmelt snowpack. And I was really interested in how climate change was affecting those variables. So that's kind of what initially got me going on that. And then I took that a little step further and kind of worked on the agricultural aspect of climate change, specifically looking at water quality. I was looking at nitrates pesticide runoff in the Central Valley of California. And then that kind of led me directly in to my postdoctoral work, which, which was mainly on stream temperature, largely due because of the important aquatic species out west salmon, trout, that depend on a particular particular stream temperature to exist.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:13

I'm interested in definitely in the the issues around hydrology within the inner mountain and arid west. I mean, that's that's kind of a big deal now. And it has been for a while, you know, ever since ever since people started living there, you know, water is is a scarce resource, in those more arid environments, and especially like what you were talking about with being dependent on on snow melt on that snowpack, for for that runoff for recharge, for all those other things that we're dealing with, what are some of the questions that you're interested in? And maybe some of the things that you learned? And in researching, particularly with in dealing with with kind of those those more snow dependent regions?

DARREN FICKLIN 7:58

Well, would you add climate change to the mix? It's not not pretty, right. So the snowpack barely exists, depending on what what climate change your projection you're looking at and working on. The snowpack barely exist at the end of the century, right. And it's largely due to air temperature, air temperature, precipitation falls that either snow is rain, right snow or rain. And when you have a higher temperature, it's more likely to fall as as rain. And then you put that on an existing snowpack. That wipes it up pretty quickly. So So that's we've done work in the Sierra, the Columbia and the Colorado, and they're all basically telling you the exact same thing, you know, when you increase air temperature, and and even when when precipitation is held steady compared to historical rates, snowpack still goes down. Yeah, so that's, that's generally a conclusion. And that's, that's not a new conclusion. There have been plenty of people looking at that. And still looking at that, and specifically, how these dynamics are going to change and whether these models can capture these dynamics, and then the you add the whole reservoir management aspect of that, which I don't do, but how are you going to manage no water or lack of water when when to release this water? For agricultural irrigation and environmental flows? It's extremely complicated.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:15

Right, and yeah, I mean, personally speaking, I've been interested in in the, the, I guess, the plight of the Great Salt Lake here in in the West, and that, specifically, when you're talking about like, yeah, reservoir management or in dealing with snowpack. They're in the in the Rockies. They're nearby they had a bunch of snow. So to back this up the Great Salt Lake has been decreasing the the water level has been decreasing for for for years, for various reasons, climate change among them. But then also they're having a they had a huge snowfall this winter, and expecting a huge snowpack, but then we're dealing with As climate variability, so then you have a lot of snow, but then the next week, it's, you know, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and you're having all that snow that's supposed to be getting packed down is melting, and then you're dealing with floods and other things like that. And so then, you know, the lake level will rise for a little while, but, but again, that that idea, like you said, that long term of the hydrology of that region of that Basin region does not look very good right now.

DARREN FICKLIN 10:29

Yeah, I mean, I did my postdoctoral project. One of my projects during my postdoctoral work was on Mono Lake in the eastern Eastern Sierras. And the issue of of that is still snowpack as well, but the main issue was that LA went up and grabbed all of the water entering entering Mono Lake now there's been some some laws to kind of, kind of move that back to a more reasonable allotments, but it's still the same. It's the same issue there. Where's the snowpack feeds, the small creeks, enter Mono Lake and when they when you don't have water, you expose the lake bed, which is salty and brine and lots of like, Salt Lake City has as well, right? Where you get these wind storms? And it just, yeah, asthma.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:09

Yeah, yeah, it's Yeah. windstorms. You have an inversion that then keeps all that that air pollution down all that kind of stuff as well. Yeah. And I mean, it's it's something that we've seen throughout throughout the world. I mean, yeah, especially there in California, Mono Lake Owens, Salton Sea. And then elsewhere, you have, you know, the Aral Sea, it's probably that the most well known one worldwide, where you have that just decrease in and that inflow. And then just, yeah, everything kind of goes to pot after that. Yes. It's tough to come back from that. And it's one of those things where, where you're changing. I don't want to be, you know, Debbie Downer about this, but a lot of times change doesn't happen until it's right there in your face. And then and then oftentimes, it's too late. So yeah, I don't know.

DARREN FICKLIN 11:57

Yeah and it's hard to tell farmers you can't have that water. Yeah, so yeah, just Yeah. When they've had it for so long.

BRAD NEWBOLD 12:05

I think I think I remember hearing and, and I hope I'm correct on this, I don't want to say anything, but but that, therefore the Great Salt Lake, the, I think about 80% of the water that comes off, is being pulled for agricultural use something along those lines as and 20%. For for other, you know, industrial or urban or residential use. Yeah. And so that's, that is a difficult situation to find yourself in, is, especially as a farmer grower producer, where, you know, now I can't do what I've been doing, or what my family has been doing for generations, because, you know, some outside, you know, outside sources telling me, you know, that I'm using too much water. I've got water rights, and I don't want to go into all that stuff. But but it's definitely something that here in the intermountain west, arid west, it's it's something that is of within the prioritize discussions, and yeah.

DARREN FICKLIN 13:05

Well, that's not going away. I mean, I know California is doing a big groundwater management, groundwater recharge management, they're putting a lot of money into that. So it's there. There's a lot of money out the West to understand these problems, and they're not stopping.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:22

Have you? Have you gotten into any any kind of involvement with with policymakers when it comes to water use or management practices?

DARREN FICKLIN 13:33

No, no, I haven't. That's something I would like to do. We have a great school on campus, School of Public Environmental Affairs. They do a lot of environmental policy. And I do have colleagues that work with with policymakers. But it's something that I haven't really reached out and done yet. It's it's something that's needed absolutely.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:52

You have a, I guess, recent or current projects on funded by the USGS on rain on snow events. And looking into those, what have you found with that was what was your primary questions going into to that project? And what have you been finding with with that?

DARREN FICKLIN 14:08

Yeah, so that projects I had a PhD student here at IU that graduate and is now at the Stroudwater center out on the East Coast. And he got the interest of looking at rain on snow, but not in the western United States to where rain on snow is is really studied. A lot are quite well. We're looking at the Great Lakes, where there's a lot of snow, a lot of snow in the Great Lakes, but rain on snow isn't really looked at there. And we know that rain on snow causes flooding up in the Great Lakes. It happens. It happens frequently. So we're kind of taking what we've learned what we've done with western United States and moved it up to the Great Lakes Basin which needs some studying as well. And the main questions was essentially what's rain on snow doing in the future? And then what we're working on right now is what's rain on snow doing to water temperatures and how that's going to affect aquatic species Michigan is, is throwing a lot of money into these species that they're introducing up up in northern Michigan. They are arctic grayling is one of them that they're trying to get back. It's been there. And I'm trying to make it make it a successful return. So with all of this, we're working with these tribes in northern Michigan, help disseminate this type of information. So we're a year into this project, we've got roughly another year to go. Right now we're doing a lot of computational work, to try to get everything ready to go. So that we can start analyzing the data, start inputting climate scenarios and, and summarizing all of this info.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:41

So what are some of your primary hypotheses then that you're you're testing or looking at with this.

DARREN FICKLIN 15:47

So with the rain on snow stuff, we assume that rain on snow is going to decrease. Right? That's not what you would necessarily think. But when you have, and we actually what we found in Northern Great Lakes Basin, it increases in the southern Great Lakes Basin, it decreases the rain on snow events. And largely because you don't in the southern portion of the Great Lakes Basin, you don't have any snow. And you need rain to occur on snow, for rain on snow to happen. So while while we are warming in the in the southern Great in the southern Great Lakes basins, Southern Michigan, Northern Indiana, Northern Great Lakes basins up like Lake Superior, there's still going to be snow there. So what we're seeing is that there's going to be an increase in rain on snow events. So flooding, for example, and on the southern portion, and we're seeing a decrease on rain on snow. And right now we're looking at these implications of what that does to stream temperatures. So the hypothesis for the water temperature aspect is if you don't have a snowpack to cool the water temperatures, alright, so if you think about a snowpack that just slowly slowly melts, you're you're constantly inputting cold water into your stream. What happens when that's gone? What happens to the water temperatures when those gone? Can these trout which are trout and salmon, which are really economically important for this entire Great Lakes basin? What happens? Are they are they able to migrate out of there? Are they even able to exist? We know that they're going to be stressed out, but how stressed out? Are they? So that's kind of the general hypothesis is when you don't have snow? What happens? Right, yeah, right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:21

With that, so you're primarily looking at at those those fish species? Is there concern with the plant community or other, you know, other organisms as well that, that as you know, again, it is are you seeing the, you know, trout and others as kind of like the The Harbinger or canary in the coal mine of how things the rest of the the ecosystem might might react to this change?

DARREN FICKLIN 17:46

I don't know much about the plant communities. But if you think about warmer waters, they're usually more productive. So what that brings in, I don't know invasives. There's a whole question of on the plant community that I'm not an expert on, we were looking at trout and salmon, because that's when you think of these idyllic streams in northern Michigan. They're trout and salmon streams. That's what that's about people spend a lot of money to go up and do. So we're looking at those. And the tribes that we're working with on on that particular project that they're very interested in as well, as far as these the fish species. Right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:21

And is it? Is there a concern with you mentioned invasive species? Is that a concern with invasive fish species? Or is it mainly just the decrease in the the trout and salmon, just so

DARREN FICKLIN 18:31

something we will be able to do is see if, if invasive fish species are able to live? Well, we'll have a whole whole ensemble of stream flows and water temperatures, and we'll be able to say which species can survive there. Because generally, we know what fish species like, what they don't like. So we can develop all these scenarios. And there's a lot of invasive talk in Lake Michigan all the time. With all of these Asian carps, whether they can eventually make it in there or not. So it's something that we could do. And something that we probably should do in the end as well to see if if these invasive species are able to even survive there.

BRAD NEWBOLD 19:15

So what are some of the, I guess, parameters? Were some of the data that you're collecting, in order to and to to model and forecasts going forward?

DARREN FICKLIN 19:26

Yeah. So this is we work with the hydrological model. And if you're not familiar with hydrological models, just think of it as a big bunch of equations that all talk to each other, right. And the general input to these equations are precipitation temperature, and then the model essentially tries to figure out what happens with the water as it goes through the landscape. That's generally what these models do. The model that we're working with, which is the Soil and Water Assessment Tool, which is an open source model, it uses a lot of GIS layers. It uses a lot of the equations that I mentioned. So That's what we're kind of working with for this model for this project, and we collect a lot of observations, but most of these observations have already been collected by the USGS, the EPA, we're also working in Canada, some because Great Lakes go up there. So we'll use Canadian data. But largely the data that we use for this for this large scale project, the data already exists, so that that makes our lives a lot easier. And because it's an open source model, we can do a lot of different things with it. So one example that we did implement rain on snow into this model, which it did not do earlier. So we can we can test a lot of these different hypotheses using this this large scale model.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:35

Right. And so there's the I guess, a separate maybe connected project in that was funded by the NSF with with hydroclimate. And so yeah, getting data from Yeah, high resolution streamflow, water temperature, GIS modeling, all that kind of stuff. Can you connect it, or go into a little bit more detail about what's going on with that with that project?

DARREN FICKLIN 20:57

Yeah, I mean, it's essentially the same, we're developing these large scale models for all of the all of North America. And essentially, what we're producing, and what we've already produced is a database of water temperatures and stream flows in the future, for essentially every, let's say, every big water body in North America. So we developed a website to where the user can go and click on a particular watershed or basin, and they can download, essentially 1950 to 2100 projections of water temperature and streamflow at the monthly time step. We're in the middle of writing this, what they call a data paper up, we're in the middle of writing this right now, or what's essentially going to be introduced to the community where they can start using it. But the methods that I just mentioned in the previous project, it's the same methods just really big scale. So in both of these projects, we're using supercomputers to do this otherwise, you know, the desktops that we're talking on? Not able to do that type of computational work.

BRAD NEWBOLD 21:59

Right. Right. And with with a lot of this, this modeling into streamflow and temperature, I guess you have some other publications, even more recently in, in nature, water, dealing with the impacts of from what you're finding, I'm assuming this is what from you're finding from these these models? And from current current research, and the impacts and and the implications for for yeah, water resource management and other things. Can you go into a bit more detail about about that?

DARREN FICKLIN 22:35

Yeah. So I took a sabbatical last spring. And during that time, I was in England, and I was working with some colleagues in England, and we all essentially got together. These were all water temperature people. We all we all got together, we figured out you know, what don't we know about water temperature. And when we look started looking back at the literature, we noticed that a lot of the water temperature studies that are they assumed natural conditions are there on these these northern Canadian rivers, Scotland, Scottish rivers that are just like perfect rivers, which if you go south and latitude, those don't exist anymore. And so what we thought is like, you know, we need to know more about what's happening with water temperature in urban landscapes when you have pipes. And when you are agricultural landscapes and we have an NSF funded project going on right now we're looking at the influence of tile drainage, on on water temperatures, as well. So we really want to understand what water temperature is doing in these really mucked up environments where we barely understand the hydrology. And we want to know what the hydrology is doing to the water temperatures and what what we've what we're doing and what that nature water paper kind of calls out as for just way more observations in these regions where we don't know anything about in the most screwed up environments. Let's do some observations and see how water temperatures react to precipitation events or heat waves or droughts because we really don't know what's going on in these really, really managed systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:06

Right with with that, how are you going about? I guess, just from a so we talked about the modeling but but even just kind of boots on the ground type of field research, how are you going about collecting the data for, you know, for instance, it looking at at tile drainage effects on on stream temperature?

DARREN FICKLIN 24:27

Yeah, we spent a month in the summer going out and deploying water temperature sensors all over the Midwest. And we specifically selected basins that have not much tile drainage and in basins that have a lot of tile drainage. And we kind of installed these, these water temperature sensors along the spectrum of no tile drainage to a lot of tile drainage. Those are those are taking data right now. I hope that so we will, that's one thing we're doing is we're going out and we've installed 20 and we're probably going to stall five to 10 more sensors. So we're going to have a lot of data Uh, hopefully right now, but we're going to go out and collect it more in the fall. And we're going to use this information, try to understand what these agriculture practices are doing for water temperature. And if you're not familiar with tile drainage, it's, it's all over the Midwest, and we don't we know how what tile drainage does to water quality that's really well studied, but not not necessarily water temperature, which is kind of determined water quality is that as well, right? Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:26

Right. I was gonna say I probably should have should have back this up a little bit, could you get go into a little into maybe not too much depth, but could you just explain tile drainage and how it's how it's used within the agricultural settings.

DARREN FICKLIN 25:39

tile drainage is essentially pipes underneath the landscape underneath agricultural landscapes. And it's essentially what it is, is it keeps the groundwater table from coming up to the surface. And, and it drains any water that comes in contact with it. So it's a perforated pipe. And that perforated pipe collects soil moisture, it collects groundwater, and it takes those pipes essentially, it's a highway for water and it takes it to the nearest water body. And that that's an agricultural ditch or river. So you can see how this would affect would affect water quality. But But the goal of tile drainage is to keep your soil from being waterlogged, either from groundwater or soil moisture, any water that intersects it, it's essentially gone because the pipes are perforated. So that's that's kind of why the Midwest is is is so agriculturally productive. Most of Northern Indiana was a wetland at one point and when you throw tiles in a wetland, they're gone, essentially. So yeah, it's all over the place, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:43

interesting. Along with that, are you measuring any kind of other issues with water quality? So you talked about I mean, you're focusing on temperature, but but anything other you know, other chemicals, you know, nitrates or pesticides or other things like that?

DARREN FICKLIN 26:58

Not really any chemicals other than water temperature, I'm not a not a water chemist. I don't have a I don't have a wet lab. I can understand water temperature. That makes sense. My PhD student right now is getting his PhD in geography, but his dissertation is on how tile drainage affects hydrology. Specifically, he's looking at the flashiness of streamflow how fast the hydrograph goes up, and that goes down. Right now we started to look at how tile drainage affects drought, whether these tile drainage drained watersheds are more susceptible to drought than their counterparts without much tile drainage. So we're looking at the hydrology aspect as well. We have several new students coming in in the fall that will probably more along they'll take the water temperature work. And right up all right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 27:43

Okay. All right. I know that you had some other some other research looking into hydrological intensification and and just how that might impact water resource management. You just dealing with with precipitation events and their duration, their their size. Can you go into explain a little bit about that, that project there?

DARREN FICKLIN 28:13

Yeah, so defining hydrological, densification is essentially too much water and then not enough water. So it's exactly what has been happening in California, where they've been having this drought, drought, drought, drought, and then they got huge snowpack, right. If you if you think about how to manage reservoirs with no water, and then you get a lot of water, do you release that water into the streams? Or do you need to back that water up in case for the next drought, to store that water? So there's kind of a you got to it's a complex decision, whether they need to do release the water store the water so that's essentially what that project looks at. And it basically looks at extreme precipitation events, and then how long between the next one? So one thing we expect with climate change is extreme precipitation events, and then a dry period between them. So that's kind of what that study is looking at. And we did, we did a lot of climate models, and we looked at what's going on throughout the world, specifically tying that into how you can manage that with water, and how you can manage that with reservoirs.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:18

Right, right. Yeah, no, going back to California. I know that I mean, with excess water they've been, we've got Tulare Lake that's back again to Lake.

DARREN FICKLIN 29:27

It's now a lake! It's a lake now!

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:29

It's a lake. It was a lake and then it wasn't a lake and that's the lake again. And again, going back to Yeah, water issues in in the arid west. And especially with with agricultural side of things. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of issues. And I mean, again, it's one of these things where where we see this, like you're saying we see this in these particular regions, but but then these are just kind of prototypical of what what the potential is elsewhere throughout the world as well?

DARREN FICKLIN 30:03

Yeah, yeah, it's just that the West United States is and other arid regions, which is completely dependent on reservoirs. Yeah. So yeah, yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:12

So what are you? I mean, did you come up with any suggestions for, for water management, I mean, you talked about reservoir management or other things like that. So

DARREN FICKLIN 30:22

I worked with Sara Nall, out of the Utah State. And she that's, that's her specialty. And we don't have many good recommendations. Other than that, you know, you kind of need to start thinking about this. planning out really extreme extreme scenarios of what happens when you have a really wet year, and then five dry years behind it. And you know, you didn't need to kind of run these in their, in their models, these reservoir management models to see what are we going to do? How can we do this? Or at least at least start thinking about this stuff? I mean, hopefully, California now is in the western United States now is thinking about this, but you know, maybe start implementing some policies. In case this happens again.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:02

Right, right. Right. All right. Well, let's switch gears here a little bit and talk about bugs. And I know this isn't your main specialty. But yeah, I was gonna say, did you ever think that you'd be an entomologist? No, no. So pretend to be one. So yeah, let's talk about let's talk about Brood X Cicadas and their emergence in 2021.

DARREN FICKLIN 31:26

Yeah, so if you're not familiar with Brood X cicadas, they come out of the ground every 17 years. And these are not, these are not flies. These are several inches in length, and a half an inch in width. So these are big, these are not, these are big bugs, they they can they can ride along on your hair or your back. So they come out every 17 years. And essentially what happens is when they come out, they leave these gigantic holes in the ground about the size of a dime. And these burrows go about, they can go up to 60 centimeters deep. So they can go relatively deep. So they emerge from the soil, they make their way up the tree. There, they can't fly yet, when they when they emerge, they eventually can when they when they break out of their shell, but they'll crawl up the tree. They'll mate on the tree. And then the larvae or nymphs will fall to the ground, dig into the soil, and they stay there for 17 years. So the research question was essentially, how does this how do these burros affect infiltration? infiltration rates. So I actually did this project in 2004, as well, which was the last emergence that was a that was an undergraduate project I worked on here, at IU. It's come full circle come full circle. The next one is, the next one is 2038. So I'll be ready for them. So essentially, what we did for this is we contacted the NSF hydrological sciences program, and we said, there's going to be a big disturbance coming, can we have just a little bit of money and what we did, is we bought the METER Group, SATURO units infiltration units, to go out and measure this, so and these are these cicadas they're can be a million per acre. So the ground looks like Swiss cheese. And there are areas in the same landscape which may not have any, any cicadas whatsoever in them. So the reason that they don't have any cicadas is maybe there's construction there between this and the previous 17 years. So what you'll see is, you'll see a lot of cicadas and these, these this fence rows or urban forests where essentially there's not been anything worked on in the past 17 years. So what we did, we took about 90 measurements with the SATURO unit all over Bloomington and we did it in urban landscapes in forested landscapes. And specifically, we had two of these units. One unit was measuring the infiltration rate, where there's a lot of cicada holes, cicada burrows, and the other one was not it where there were no cicada holes. So they're, you know, roughly two meters apart, we could kind of kind of find areas where there weren't any emergence holes. And what we found was that we found almost an 80% difference in infiltration rates in forested landscapes. So they these these bugs caused quite a bit of an increase in infiltration. We did not find any difference in urban or urban landscapes though, which was, which was very interesting. And we attribute that to there's a lot of compaction, soil compaction in these urban landscapes. So cicadas have a rough time, I guess burrowing down and they'll tend to have shallow or shallower burrows. And what we think is essentially if you have shallow burrows, you can take on less water. So we didn't actually see any difference of infiltration rates. So that's essentially what we what we found that that project it we still have a ton of data that we're working on, but it's officially going to wrap up this fall. So we there was An army of graduate students and undergraduate students all over Bloomington, surrounded by cicadas and taken all of these measurements, but it was, it was the easiest research question I've ever developed. Because it was it's just right, it was just right there in front of us, you know, how does this affect water, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:16

Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, I want to get into more of the results with that hydraulic conductivity. But, but what Yeah, dealing with with the timing, because you know, that it's coming was it was a difficult to get funding ahead of time to plan up and say, Hey, I need it by I need to have this ready to go bye, bye, you know, was it spring 2021? Or whatever it may be? And then and then also, secondary to that, is that is the timing within your, your measurements? As as well? Is there? Is there? Is there a timing issue? Where where those holes, then will will fill in? And then you might not have the right, you know, the right results that that might or I guess the more accurate results they might get earlier on? So two questions are about timing?

DARREN FICKLIN 36:10

Well, the answer is yes to both timing is very important. So the the product at the NSF project that we funded that we asked for funding was NSF rapid and rapid means you don't need to go through the review, go through the program manager, and they will essentially cut you a check to do what you're requesting to do. So that process didn't take too long. I don't remember but month, month and a half or so, that had to start in March, or mid spring to get that happen. And then essentially, once I got the money, what the only hold up was getting the equipment to me. And that that that was that was on time as well. So I got the equipment in roughly mid May, maybe late May. And they all emerged in mid May, late May. So the timing was kind of very important. I had to get the measurements as soon as they soon as they got here as soon as they emerged. The other question, yeah, we had to get we had to get these measurements quick. Because it was noticeable, especially in the Midwest, when leaves started falling from the trees, big storms sediment, filling it up back up a sediment. So we wanted to get as many measurements as we could, I mean, we took 90 measurements, which was essentially five days a week with four or five people out in the field. So 90 measurements is quite a bit for this for this type of work. Now, we only used about 70, because there were some issues with the soil afterwards. So we can go into those a little bit later. But yeah, timing, we had to get it. We had to get all these measurements as quick as possible.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:40

Yeah so yeah, so let's, let's get into so how are you? So we talked about using the SATURO Infiltrometer, how are you, how are you using that? How are you doing your site selection? Yeah, could you get into just kind of the nitty gritty of how the the field process worked?

DARREN FICKLIN 37:59

Yeah. So we know, we wanted to compare the cicada infiltration rates in in forested and urban landscapes. So that that was kind of criteria number one. And essentially, we had a forest that we worked in, so we were pretty good there, we could we could find the cicada holes, take the measurements, and then look around several meters and find an area without nice decadal holes, and then we would just set these two units up at once. And they would they would just be going for, you know, two or three hours, however long they go. Urban was a little harder. We mostly concentrated our measurements in parks, parks and lawns, where we had permission to be in there taking measurements. But essentially, we needed to, we needed to find areas where the emergences were pretty, have a pretty high rate. And then and then work backwards from there. Okay, so that that's generally the fieldwork. And then we would we took 90 measurements in total, and we use 70. I think for the paper that was published earlier this year on this.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:01

So with that, you said you found an 80% difference between the disturbed and undisturbed when when it comes to is that field saturated hydraulic conductivity is that correct?

DARREN FICKLIN 39:11

That's Kfs (field saturated hydraulic conductivity). Yep fields such as oh, yep.

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:14

And, and so I guess, is that what you were expecting? We're expecting more or less or, or does that sound about right?

DARREN FICKLIN 39:25

We didn't know what we would expect that areas with high ticket emergence borrows, you would have higher infiltration rates. That makes sense, right. And we expected that to happen. But we did not see that in urban landscapes for for the reasons I previously mentioned. So hypotheses Yeah, we should see higher saturated hydraulic conductivity rates and areas with with higher emergence rates. Yeah. But we didn't know the percent because this, this hasn't been done. Yeah, we had no idea. We had no idea, you know earthworms. I think it's 10%. Okay, but this was pretty I mean, these are big holes, these aren't earth worm holes so I mean.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:00

Yeah these Yeah, right these are large macropores.

DARREN FICKLIN 40:02

Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:03

I guess one of the other questions that I had was, do you see other, you know, macro invertebrates like like cicadas or any other animals along those lines that have potentially as big as an impact as what you were seeing? I guess the biggest impact on soil hydrology, as what you're seeing with cicadas are.

DARREN FICKLIN 40:25

Not in this area, not in this area. I mean, this was a really intense emergence to where there's the soil look like Swiss cheese.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:34

Right. So I mean, you're talking about millions per acre, right?

DARREN FICKLIN 40:37

Yeah, so there's nothing around here that does that. So no, I think this was the this was the as high as the Kfs. Probably could be in forested landscapes. And so now we're starting to think about what are the implications of this type of work? Right. Yeah. And in one of the things we are looking at is this potential, what happens in underneath this groundwater? What happens underneath the groundwater, where there are papers in review about what happens with soil respiration? When this when this happens? So carbon carbon fluxes and nitrogen fluxes? So the implication so I kind of started out as the water person, and I'm kind of building on what are the implications of other aspects.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:21

Right. Right. Because I mean, especially with you know the emergences, like like these, I mean, they're huge, but they're, they are only, you know, 17 years apart. That's, that seems like a, it's a very long time when you're dealing with especially lifecycles of of invertebrates. But is it is it something where, where we might see, I mean, I guess, man, like, climate change comes into play, as well as that, as the climate changes, I'm assuming that putting my my fake entomologist hat on is that I'm assuming that that this emergence is triggered by by environmental factors, potentially, I mean, for it to be 17 years. I mean, for other for other emergent, you know, species, it's based off of, you know, you know, degree days or other things like that, where, where there's those internal processes, that that trigger these things. Do you see potentially, I mean, I guess, couple questions here. Do you see climate change affecting the emergence of of cicadas, you've been you've been doing some work in, in climate change in the region. But then on the other side, as well, is that could the cicadas as as we're as urbanization expands or dealing with the impacts of, you know, water flow within the soil? Could there be changes or future impacts? To any kind of degree where we we might need to mitigate or manage the issue?

DARREN FICKLIN 42:52

Yeah. So as far as climate change, they emerge when it's the soil has been 64 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. So they'll start to move up. So if you want to just warm up the soil, then they're going to emerge earlier right now, why they come out every 17 years? I could not find a good answer for that. Whether the cicadas kind of track the number of you know, summer cycles, I don't know I don't put my fake fake entomology head on to and but I don't know why they emerge every 17 years. But if you talked about climate change, it's all dependent on soil temperature for them. So warm up soil, and they're gonna merge earlier into the year so maybe instead of mid May, they're maybe gonna move early May alright, and it's gonna screw up graduation around here. The the the other thing is, is there the nips, essentially hanging out in like a little feeding cell and these feeding cells are attached to a tree root. So cicadas have to be where trees are at all times. So they are not going to they're not going to emerge in the middle of a soccer field, unless there was a tree there 17 years ago, right, so they need to be near trees, because that's what they feed on the roots. So but from our studies, we think, you know, all these deforestations, suburban housing, moving out, anything that's going to disturb that top of the soil column where these nymphs are hanging out right now is going to wipe out the cicadas are there they're not going to they won't come back in these areas. And I live in an old neighborhood where their cicadas were all over the place. And right across the street was a new subdivision. There were no cicadas in that entire subdivision.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:33

Interesting.

DARREN FICKLIN 44:34

So, so that type of land use management will certainly wipe out cicadas.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:39

Right. Right. Well, any other interesting stories, I guess, when you're dealing with with bugs, there's got to be some funny stories about people getting attacked by bugs or Yeah, well, more or anything.

DARREN FICKLIN 44:53

My wife went grocery shopping with two cicadas on her shoulder the entire time. That was a common occurrence when you go to the grocery store during that time period. As I was walking my dog around the neighborhood, I talked to another dog owner whose dog had to get their stomach pumped. Because they've eaten so many cicadas out in their yard. They're the moles were outrageous. I've never seen more moles in my yard. During this time period. Everyone was eating well, the birds are eating well everyone was eating well, at this time period, it was even so even so there the birds were having a buffet there were still there were still so many, then the noise was deafening. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. It's it's a wild experience for for about a month, month and a half.

BRAD NEWBOLD 45:40

Yeah, man. Well, well, good luck in 2038 when they'll be back, though, coming around again, you'll have everything everything ready. Yeah, I was gonna say come and come 2038. I mean, if you put your, your, your future you hat on? Do you have any other questions that you would like to investigate when it comes to soil hydrology with with cicada emergence,

DARREN FICKLIN 46:00

I would love to get some groundwater wells in. I would love to get a sense I know where they're at. I'd love to get some soil moisture sensors that go deeper in the landscape and actually see what happens to soil moisture during during precipitation events. And so these questions are endless now that we know a little bit more about what they do. We can be a little bit more prepared for this, even though we had 17 years to be prepared for it. We we still we still had to rush it through it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:28

All right. Well, I'm sure we'll be in touch then.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:30

Yes, yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:31

When that comes around, so.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:32

Go ahead and get the equipment ordered now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:34

That's right we now have to sit around for 17 years. I don't think our warranties last that long.

DARREN FICKLIN 46:40

Ah okay we'll have to renew that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:42

Yeah, all right. So let's switch gears one final time here. You had a project a couple years ago that you're working on in dealing with crowdsourcing and citizen science when it comes to hydrology and just looking at watershed data. Can you talk about that little is it is the Boyne river research project. Is that Is that correct? I pronounced that right. Yep. Yeah, so the Boyne river research project, yeah can you go into a little detail about about that project, how it started and why you were looking to use a citizen scientists?

DARREN FICKLIN 47:19

Yeah, it was in the Boyne River. This was a river in northern Michigan, kind of the same types of rivers, we just talked about lots of trout, lots of salmon, lots of people spending money to fish on this. And we, I worked with people at a crowd hydrology.com, where most of this information come from, and we kind of got an idea of like, okay, so the USGS, they do a really good job of measuring streamflow and water temperature, but they can't do everything. And they can't really get these smaller rivers. So what would happen if we installed some citizen science measurements, citizen scientists, devices, and these devices, it's a ruler in a river, that's all it really is. It's a ruler in a river on a piece of wood. And the top of the ruler says, Call text this number with the height of the water. What we did a little unique with this project is that we also installed digital thermometers as well. So there'll be two, two poles in the water, what is it and what's the water temperature, and there's a digital screen that says, you know, whatever, whatever temperature it is. And both of these have signs that say send this data to Texas, Texas, this information that gets cataloged somewhere and it just waits on us to do something with it. So at the same time, we were developing one of these hydrological models for the Boyne river. And the really the research question is, can we use this citizen science data for hydrological modeling? Usually, we use USGS data, because it's, it's reliable, it's accurate, etc. But if we were successful, right, so we got a lot of these citizen science measurements, and we use these citizen science measurements, we didn't get a lot of them, but they're certainly enough to do what we wanted to do. So we integrated these measurements into a hydrological model model was relatively accurate. And we were we could do some things with this model. And what we did was we developed a website to where we would forecast the streamflow in the water temperature for up to seven days in the pants, not too different to what you're seeing on the phone with the weather, to where the local community can can click on a particular day and seeing what the water temperature is going to be in a particular stream or each, you know, five days from now. So ultimately, it worked. You know, the main issue with this type of work is the uncertainty of the data with the USGS, you know, you know what you're getting and it's pretty reliable, but here we were getting we know we know that the know that the water level is not 15 feet. You know, we know we know that so we'd have to throw that information out. I would have people send me pictures of the of the gage just is not not what I wanted. But we would get a lot of different different types of data that we couldn't use. And if someone sent us a data that was one foot, that's a reasonable number, right? We don't know if that's right, or whether it's wrong, but something that we had to account for when we're developing these hydrological models of this region. So

BRAD NEWBOLD 50:24

So yeah, so a couple well, first question yeah, do you, I mean, do you bake some some, I guess, some variability into into that model when you're dealing with with those data?

DARREN FICKLIN 50:35

Yeah, so what we did a Data Assimilation technique, and we can assume some uncertainty associated with that, right? I don't remember what number we use, but you know, think about plus or minus 10%, or, you know, whatever, whatever that is, we can kind of bake that in which it's useful when you're working with this type of data to do something like that. Because you don't know what you're getting.

BRAD NEWBOLD 50:57

Right, yeah. And I think with any kind of forecasting models, or any anything along those lines, I mean, we're dealing with probabilistic models, where, where's your, you're dealing with a range of certainties? And so yeah, so yeah, even for even for, like you mentioned, you know, our weather forecasts, or whatever, you might say, oh, you know, the Weather Channel says it's going to be a high of this and this, but they're, they're basically taking that, you know, that mean, or whatever it may be of their models and saying, Hey, this is our, our, you know, 95% certainty or something along those lines. Yeah. So yeah, all that kind of stuff is kind of baked in, that we take for granted, when we're when we're dealing with models on a daily basis.

DARREN FICKLIN 51:36

Yep. That's essentially what we had to do. You know, we knew roughly, workflow from previous work, we knew what the uncertainty should be, we could kind of bake that in, and we're gonna be around a range rather than an exact value.

BRAD NEWBOLD 51:51

Right yeah. And if you were, if you were to do this again, or revive it, or, you know, do it somewhere there in Indiana. What are some of the improvements that you think you'd could make in dealing with kind of crowdsourcing citizen science data?

DARREN FICKLIN 52:04

Well, where we worked with, and Boyne, we worked with a community within Boyne called the Friends of the Boyne River, and they are heavily invested in the Boyne river. So they would go out and take measurements for us a lot. Alright, so one of the things that we learned from this type of type of study is you can't just pick another watershed, you need to have a community that cares about the river. Because if they don't, then you're not gonna get the measurements. So there's really no use of you being there. All right. So we targeted the Boyne river because we had worked with or some of us have worked with the Friends of the Boyne River, who would we know that they would they paddle the river all the time, they clean up the river all the time. So we developed a relationship with them prior to even starting to study. So if I were to pick a watershed in Indiana, we would need to do the exact same thing. Like I said, otherwise, if if the citizens aren't taking observations, there's no citizen science going on. Right. So there's just no point. So that's kind of the big take home message there.

BRAD NEWBOLD 53:08

Great, we're getting close to our time. Any any final thoughts for our audience about about stuff that you're working on? Or? Or anything that we've talked about?

DARREN FICKLIN 53:19

No, I mean, I think we've mentioned a lot. A lot of the stuff that we've talked about are kind of still going, for example, the rain on snow that we mentioned earlier on, some of this still going on. Citizen science, we're always trying to bring up we've always talked about going out to the Yellowstone and doing something very similar to look at a different research question out there it's flooding. In Northern Michigan, it's more species, aquatic species. So yeah, a lot of these a lot of these projects that we talked about are kind of they're still going on. And some future research projects were usually largely dictated by the students that I work with their their interest, and they may not be interested in, in flooding, they may be interested in drought, and we'll go we'll go that direction with them so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:04

Right, right, awesome. Alright and if anybody in our audience wants to find out more about this stuff that you're working on, where might they be able to go?

DARREN FICKLIN 54:15

You can always send me an email at D-Ficklin, [email protected]. I don't know what social media exists at this point. Right now it's X, I don't know what it'll be. But I am, I am @d_ficklin on Twitter/X. If you want to find me there. We would maybe talk to talk elsewhere. So that those are the main ones send me an email, always happy to chat about these projects and get something going.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:45

Okay, awesome. Well, our time is up for today. Thanks again, Darren, for being with us. We really appreciate you taking time to talk with us today. I know I've enjoyed the discussion. I hope that those in our audience, have as well.

DARREN FICKLIN 54:58

Had a great time. Thank you for having me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 55:02

Stay safe and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World!

Steve Blecker PhD is a research soil scientist with the Ag Experiment Station at Colorado State University. He obtained his Bachelor's at Penn State University and graduate degree in pathology at Colorado State University. His research focuses on sustainable agriculture, soil health, and range land restoration. Steve is actively involved in collaborative projects with the farming community and contributes to the advancement of sustainable and resilient agricultural practices.

Jim Ippolito PhD is currently a professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University. He obtained his Bachelor's in agronomy from the University of Delaware, and his graduate degree in soil chemistry, fertility, and quality from Colorado State University. Jim is an expert in and teaches soil fertility and soil health principles and practices. He is actively involved in research, teaching, and extension activities, working to improve soil health and fertility for the benefit of farmers, land managers, and the environment.

Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

JIM IPPOLITO 0:07

My gut is telling me that this is where we're going to see the best bang for our buck in terms of return on investment, for improving carbon in our soils, it's going to be in the Western United States, we're going to see drastic improvements. And I'll tell you from some of my experiences with other soil health projects, that if you do things, quote, right, you might see a change in less than five years. In fact, we had a project over on the western slope of Colorado where we saw changes in three years in terms of organic carbon accumulation in the soil surface in three years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:41

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continues. Today's guests are Steve Blecker and Jim Ippolito. Steve Blecher, is a research soil scientist with the Ag Experiment Station at Colorado State University. He obtained his Bachelor's at Penn State University and graduate degrees and pathology at Colorado State University. His research focuses on sustainable agriculture, soil health and range land restoration. Steve is actively involved in collaborative projects with the farming community and contributes to the advancement of sustainable and resilient agricultural practices. Jim Ippolito is currently a professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University. He obtained his Bachelor's in agronomy from the University of Delaware, and his graduate degrees in soil chemistry, fertility and quality from Colorado State University. Jim is an expert in and teaches soil fertility and soil health principles and practices. He is actively involved in research, teaching and extension activities, working to improve soil health and fertility for the benefit of farmers, land managers and the environment. And today, they're here to talk about their research into agroecosystem management, soil health, and Ecosystem Sustainability and resiliency. So Steve, and Jim, thanks so much for being here.

STEVE BLECKER 2:09

Glad to be here.

JIM IPPOLITO 2:09

Yeah, thanks for having us Brad.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:12

Alright. So today, we wanted to talk about a few of your projects and research interest. But first, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in soil science and your particular specialties?

STEVE BLECKER 2:25

Yeah, I just sort of wandered into soils, really, I mean, I didn't really like I didn't really know what I wanted to do at Penn State and I just kept kind of wandering around taking different classes. And the day, I took the I took an intro to soils class, and then it just something just clicked. I was like, wow, this is really cool. I mean, people actually study soils, I mean, wow. So I just took all the soils classes, I could get a hold of, and then my undergrad ran out, and I just wanted to keep going. So turned to grad school. And it's learning about soils ever since.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:03

what got you involved in in kind of the agricultural side and with extension activities?

STEVE BLECKER 3:08

Well, that's pretty recent development. For me, I was I was doing more basic research for most of my for a lot of my career anyway. And, and just kind of once, when I came back to Colorado, and in my current position, there was this opportunity to do a lot more kind of applied research, just kind of work with growers in different agroecosystems, it just kind of you know it was exciting to me to be able to, you know, instead of, I used to publish in, not that I don't publish anymore, but in scientific journals, and maybe read by a handful of people, but now it's just it's more I'm more interested in kind of connecting with growers and just letting helping them understand the soils that they're working with.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:56

And Jim, how about you?

JIM IPPOLITO 3:58

Well, my, my path into soils is much like Steve's like, when I was an undergrad, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I was geared towards sciences, like science is in my blood, basically, in my genes. And I knew I didn't want to go into chemistry. My, my family has a long history of being in the chemistry field. So I steered clear of chemistry. I really steered clear of chemistry. And then I stumbled across horticulture class when I was a freshman. I said, Oh, that's interesting. Let me go see if there's any other classes that are offered within the College of Ag at the University of Delaware. And just like Steve, I took Intro to soil science. And I was hooked. I just, it just felt right. And lo and behold, there is a lot of chemistry in soil science. And so I'm a chemist. I consider myself a soil chemist and I love it. I just love what I do. I've been involved with a lot of different sectors though. A lot of ag over my 30 plus year career, in fact, most of it has been an ag but also in, in sites that have been contaminated with heavy metals, or more recently sites that are contaminated with these forever chemical compounds, PFAS's and PFOA's. And, you know, just solving problems, I'm, I'm really an applied soil chemist, I love what I do. And, and I've known Steve, we both known each other's for oh my gosh, since 1990, we went to grad school together at Colorado State University, and our paths have just done this, we've interwoven our paths over the over the years. So, which is why we still work together.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:42

That's good. That's good that you guys still like each other, then after working together so long, more or less. And I do hope that maybe we can come back and talk about those forever chemicals. That was kind of a side, you know, side discussion that I think is really interesting and pertinent to a lot of stuff that's been, you know, popping up recently. I mean, but anyway, we'll come maybe we'll come back to that later. So one of the one of the I guess, themes, or I guess, overarching research interests that seems to be within both of your specialties deals with soil health, or what we have now call soil health I know, in the intro, Jim, we talked about your or I mentioned that your degrees were in soil chemistry, fertility quality, which is kind of what now we would term soil health. I was wondering if you if you guys could just kind of give us a give our audience a basic overview of what we what is considered now soil health, what are the the principles that that go into soil health? You know, how do we, how do we quantify or measure soil health and kind of all those kinds of things?

STEVE BLECKER 6:54

Okay, I'll take a crack at it, and then fill in the gaps, Steve, because, you know, when I think about soil health, and when I talk about soil health to a lot of people that maybe are not strongly familiar with soil health, this is how I approach it, I approach it much like discussing human health. And when we go to the doctor, because maybe we don't feel right, and the doctor runs a bunch of tests on us, right, so a doctor may ask you to run on a treadmill, for example, to take a look at maybe physical health, you'll get a blood draw. So blood might be chemical health, and sooner or later down the line, somebody's probably going to start taking some gut microbiome samples from you. And that's a measure of biological health. So when we talk about health, especially with humans, we oftentimes never talk about health directly, but we look at the measurements that we think get are geared towards human health or the like, good human health, if you will, we do the same thing with soils. So in soils, we look at soil physical characteristics, chemical characteristics, and certainly biological characteristics. And we look for the sometimes we call it the sweet spot, at least that's what I call it, where all three of these physical, chemical and biological overlap. And, you know, you can think of three circles overlapping. Many of us have used this analogy before, and looking at where that circle in the center encompasses the, quote, best of physical, chemical and soil, biological health. So that's, that's my approach. And to be honest with you, I've used this approach for oh my gosh, almost my entire career without even knowing it. What do you think, Steve?

STEVE BLECKER 8:39

Man, that's a hard act to follow. I like the analogy with the human health. I hadn't thought of that. That's pretty good. But no, I mean, you're right. It's the name has changed, didn't always used to be soil health, but the things we measure, I mean, there's three major biology, chemistry and the physical properties of soil. I mean, you're right. I mean, that's, that's how they interact, to determine, you know, how healthy your soil is going to be for, you know, what the end uses, in our case, a lot of its agriculture. So how do these different properties interact.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:13

So, so along with with what you're talking about with, you know, I guess, using continuing with that analogy or metaphor of, of human health, are there? I guess there's two questions that I have here. And maybe they're kind of kind of overlapping here. But within when we're dealing with human health, you know, we will check our pulse to see if we're still alive, right. That's kind of a very basic, basic overview of how you're doing right if you're, you're healthy, you're alive. But But like you said, there's there's other aspects as well. Are there and I don't I don't want to say are there shortcuts but are there are there particular measurements or characteristics of the soil itself, where you can kind of say, hey, kind of just take a quick snapshot and say, soil is doing pretty good because of XY and Z? Or is it something where you really do have to dig in to each of those physical, biological and chemical characteristics to really say how healthy that soil is?

STEVE BLECKER 10:23

Yeah, that's a great question. I, I don't know if there's any shortcuts, because every soil is different. And every, even if the soil is the same, the management practices under which the soil is, is under Well, that's the management practices that are being applied to a soil, even if the soil is the same changes the soil, we all know that. So quantifying soil health is, it can be somewhat tricky, because if you want to take a shortcut, and you know, a shortcut in one soil, it may not be applicable for a completely different soil. And so I think about the programs that we run at Colorado State University and Ohio State University, and we look at a number of different indicators or soil characteristics that encompass physical, chemical and biological health. And what we tried to do is tease out the minimum data set, that would be for a specific soil, or maybe a specific management system, or something along those lines, which is basically what we're doing with a number of projects that we have at Colorado State University. And we don't want to have a producer sending a soil sample to our testing facility or another testing facility to analyze for 20 different characteristics when maybe only three are necessary. That's, that's the sweet spot that we look for in these different systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:50

I guess what would soil like you said, there's, there's differences between, you know, how soil might look or a particular type of soil within varied, you know, agricultural, or other land management uses. How would How would a, I guess, what would a healthy soil look like? If we want to, you know, stereotype we're whatever, what would a healthy soil look like? In, you know, an agricultural field versus a healthy soil? Say, even just in, you know, general environment? So with, you know, within? I don't know, if if getting into forestry is too deep for you guys, or whatever? And versus, you know, I don't know, if if we're dealing with soil health as much in you know, more of the civil engineering side of things. There's different things that they look at for that, but how would How would a healthy soil? What would a healthy healthy soil look like in those different situations? And is there some, some overlap? Or would you expect completely different soil profile profiles to I don't want to say, you know, but different soil, like suites of characteristics within those different regions or spaces?

STEVE BLECKER 13:05

What yeah, there's, I mean, the big concern in Colorado, is water, I mean, we're a pretty dry state. And anything you can do to improve the water holding capacity of the soil, I mean, that generally will help the soil health, but also help the plant productivity. So I mean, you can just go out into a field and dig up the surface of soil and, you know, you can see how well it's aggregated, you know, what kind of pore space can the water move freely down into the soil kind of. So it can be stored in how much organic matter, you'll always hear, can't get away from soil health without talking about organic matter in our soil carbon, because it's just, it's so key to so many different properties. One of which, of course, is its ability to hold water. So if you I mean, if you go out in the field and look side by side, you can just pull out a cloud of soil and, you know, see how well it's aggregated. Versus in I've seen people like the NRCS, they'll take a chunk of soil that's healthy, and put it in like a big, clear cylinder and let it sit there. And if it's, you know, the healthier soil kind of stays together, the aggregates hold together, whereas a soil that's, you know, quote, unquote, less healthy, tends to, you know, kind of break apart and fall apart much quicker. So that's there's a lot of visual cues, you can look at.

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:26

How, I guess, what are some are there some general principles, I guess, for land managers to think about when it comes to just overall improving their soil health? I mean, what if there were just key steps or? Yeah, just kind of a basic outline for how to improve your soil health. What would those look like?

JIM IPPOLITO 14:54

Yeah, that's a great question. I think having a PhD I often use the term it depends. Because it really depends on where you're located. So I think about the projects that we have where we're using METER Group equipment, we were using them dominating the Western United States, specifically Colorado, and then in other surrounding states, but mainly Colorado, and we're talking about the Western US. So in Colorado, for example, a basic outline would be, like Steve just mentioned, focusing first on carbon. And anything that you can do to improve organic carbon content in the soils of Colorado, for example, you're gonna win the battle, and you likely will see an improvement in soil health. And, and there's a reason behind this because the soils in Colorado are naturally low in organic carbon content. And they've become lower over time because of historical agricultural practices. So anything we can do to increase organic carbon in the soils that are relatively fragile, that typically have less than probably three and a half percent organic carbon or organic matter to begin with, is a bonus in the western United States. And that leads to what Steve mentioned, increases in water holding capacity aggregate stability, carbon is a food source for micro organisms that enhance nutrient cycling and turnover, which enhances the chemistry of soils. And it's all linked together. And, and if you looked at those three circles, biology, chemistry, and physical aspects, the sweet spot where those three overlap is carbon, it's really carbon in the center. That's how I look at it. I'm not a carbon chemist, definitely not a carbon chemist, but we measure carbon, and we've measured carbon in our soils for decades. Now, Steve, and I have done this for 30 or 30 plus years together, yeah, because this ties in with what we're doing with the equipment. And so you know, in the western US, we're drought prone. And so anything we can do to increase water holding capacity of our soils, is a benefit. So in terms of soil health, or looking for systems that producers manage, that get a little bit more bang for the buck in terms of carbon storage, and subsequently utilizing METER Group equipment, to take a look at the changes in moisture holding capacity over time. And one of the things that's just really, it just stands out to me is when you look at the soil health research has been done across the US. And if you look at the areas of the US where METER Group equipment is located, there is a big hole, and it's almost hovered over Colorado. So that's what we're trying to do with our projects is to fill that gap.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:54

Awesome. We're glad to help out with that as well. So no, I think definitely, definitely, I think that that is one thing and because we see this in in lots of different in varied applications, whether you're talking about soil moisture, or other soil characteristics, but also, we have that with, you know, with weather monitoring, or whatever sorts of systems, we have a lot of these these regional Mezonets that are going up throughout the United States and elsewhere. And by creating we've we've also had people on our podcast talking about Yeah, creating networks of soil moisture, data and so moisture, water potential, so yeah, soil water potential, those kinds of matrix potential, that kind of stuff. So definitely got being able to, to connect, we want to be able to know what's going on in the here and now. But also, there's, there's this added, imperative, you know, this, this added, I guess, urgency to also be able to predict what's, or forecast, what's going to be happening in the next, you know, 5-10-50 years down the road as well. And if we don't have that good data right now to work with, then then we're, you know, just kind of shooting in the dark type of thing. So, let's...

STEVE BLECKER 19:20

One thing we're kind of, I mean, we're kind of looking into because we have, we have METER sensors scattered over pretty large chunk of the state in all kinds of different agroecosystems, irrigated non irrigated range land. So that, you know, it got us thinking what I mean, there's, initially the idea is to, you know, let the producer understand, like, what his practices are doing to soil moisture. But also at the same time, we have, as you mentioned, I mean, we were kind of just inadvertently, I guess, building this network of soil moisture monitoring stations across the state that yeah, so that might be able to help us answer You know, some of these questions about, you know, how the different systems respond to drought and so

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:04

Right, right. And I want to come back to this to in particular, in talking with you're talking with you about, about your, your main research project, because there's a lot that we want to know and understand about, about the instrumentation, but also about just the the challenges in creating, like you said, inadvertently, or on purpose, creating these networks, and, and being able to say, okay, what are the challenges in having, you know, all sorts of instrumentation just all over the place, about, you know, installation, and, and, and connecting them all. And not to mention, you know, collecting the data, as well as analyzing it. And we're dealing with, you know, getting into big data issues, and all that kind of stuff. And so, so there's a lot of a lot of interesting questions that we can talk about here in a second with that. I want to let's, let's switch gears, and we did have some folks here that wanted to know more about, they're in Colorado, the STAR program. They're in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture, they're in Colorado, can you tell us a little bit about that program and what it's all about?

STEVE BLECKER 21:30

Steve's gonna pawn it off on me. Okay. So the STAR program is something that was not initially created in Colorado, it initially began in Champaign County, Illinois, it stands for Saving Tomorrow's Agricultural Resources program. And in Illinois, it was geared around water quality. So programs, ie management of different parcels of land to help improve water quality that's moving off site from a parcel of land. We took that concept. And oh, my gosh, probably about three or four years ago, in Colorado, we created with the help of a lot of people, the STAR program that's centered around soil health, not water quality. Again, it still stands for Saving Tomorrow's Agricultural Resources, but it's based on essentially the backbone of the five principles of soil health at the NRCS promotes. And so I can't remember all of them. I'm drawing a blank here, but you know, it's soil cover living roots, introduction of livestock. There's two others, I should know these off top my head, I've done this for so long, and probably just blanket I'm blanking. But the the five principles of soil health that the NRCS promotes. And then what we've done is we've created in Colorado, a set of STAR field forms that are housed on the Colorado Department of Agriculture's STAR website. And these field forms were developed hand in hand with producers in different sectors of of ag within the state of Colorado. And so we went through, I don't know how many iterations of these field forms hand in hand with producers to come up with a scoring system. So producers will if they're growing corn, for example, in the state of Colorado, they can feel fill out a field form that's geared towards corn, they're asked a number of different questions and the questions are scored. And then the scores are accumulated. And they fall into one of five categories. So they and they receive a STAR placard. And the STAR placard that goes into their field or on their fence is either 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 stars. One star is the producer is doing the average as to what everybody else is doing in terms of focusing on soil health within that type of agroecosystem, and five is your, you've maxed out all the soil health principles that the NRCS promotes. Getting a five star is really, really difficult. Getting a one star is really, really easy. And we've set this up hand in hand with the producers to do this on purpose because not everybody should get a five star if they're only doing a three star work in their field. And so this is this is what we've developed and we have I think 11 different field forms for all sorts of different types of crops and it might even go into we didn't create a we didn't create a field for for rangelands, did we Steve?

STEVE BLECKER 24:44

Other grazing lands? Yeah. It covers rangelands,

STEVE BLECKER 24:49

But it's an it's completely voluntary. almost completely voluntary. Alright, so there's part of it. That's voluntary. If a producer wants to become part of the STAR program, they can. And we also have something called Star Plus. And this is, and this is the incentive based program from what I remember. So, correct, yeah, so other producers who, if they're lucky enough to get into the STAR Plus program, there are certain additional requirements that they need to meet, in order to get an incentive payment from the Colorado Department of Agriculture. It's but the premise is still the same, they fill out a STAR form, they get a rating. And then what we're trying to do in our programs, is to look at these different management practices or tweak these management practices to increase the STAR rating from say, a one to a two, or maybe a three to a four on a particular parcel of land. Did I miss anything? I

STEVE BLECKER 25:52

I mean, basically, no that covers it pretty well, I mean, basically, the idea is to just go out and interact with these producers and just have a conversation about soil health, and try to get them to, you know, they need to try out, they need to commit to trying out one of these, one of the five principles of soil health, just implement a new practice that they haven't tried before, on other portion of their field, a whole new field, and then just see what happens. You know, and that's what we're, that's what we've kind of started in the past couple years, we're kind of at the, the leading edge of, of the star plus projects. So we don't really have any revenue data coming in yet. But that's been interesting just to go out there and interact with all these different folks and all these different agroecosystems.

STEVE BLECKER 26:36

Yeah, the you know, one of the most exciting portions of this project are that it's not one project. It's multiple projects that use the STAR program. But I think one of the most exciting things is one working hand in hand with producers to come up with a rating system, two these placards that will go out into fields. And our programs are supposedly touching about 500 producers across the state. So it's not inconsequential. And so each producer will have a placard that should be visible along some road that they live near the where the field is located, to hopefully generate discussion and interest among other producers, because we all know producers go down to the local coffee shop, and, and chit chat, right. I mean, they do more than chitchat, they talk about what they see and this, this, hopefully will generate some interest to get more people involved in the program. And the last thing I want to mention to you, which is part of our climate smart commodities project is we're hoping that this STAR rating system will eventually end up as a market signal. So if you're a producer, with a five star rating, you might get a little bit extra, when you sell your commodity on the market. We're really hoping that this is what this leads to.

BRAD NEWBOLD 27:52

Yeah, I was I mean, that's good to hear that it's one of my my biggest questions with that was the adoption, you know, producers and growers are notoriously slow at at adopting new technology, new practices, or at least that's the, that's the the traditional view of how things go. They're there some early adopters, and here and there, but it's because it's such a, you know, risk reward practice when it comes to agriculture, is that if they do see that things are working out towards their benefit, then at least from what from what we've seen here, then you can really start to see that shift in, in best practices, from a potential, you know, from traditional practices that have been going on for, you know, a century or two, to or even or even more, to those where where we have kind of either new technology, new ideas, or new innovations in land management. And so that's really good to see. I was I was interested in that incentive, like how much of an incentive does it take to to generate this, you know, to generate buzz or to generate adoption, but it sounds like it's, it's going pretty well there, at least in Colorado. Along with that and both of you, Steve, you talked about going out and you know, visiting face to face with with these growers with producers, and communicating the this this program or the benefits to adopting this program or any other or even if it deals with just soil health in general or other practices. This is one of these questions that kind of pops up with a lot of our guests is Have you have you felt that there's there are practices or techniques that you've used that you found successful in communicating? I guess kind of in translating scientific research to the layperson or to in your instance With with growers and producers, is there because a lot of times within this, you know, scientific community within academia, again, we're using jargon, we're going back and forth, we're, you know, publishing white papers and peer reviewed journals, that really doesn't percolate down to the general audience. And especially in this case where the general audience, those growers and producers are the ones who would benefit most from the research that you're doing. So, to back this back up again, have you found any? Or what are the points of success that you've seen in being able to communicate your research to, to a lay audience?

STEVE BLECKER 30:37

Let me give this a shot first, and because I had an extension appointment at Colorado State University, and it was pretty large. And so I, part of my job was to talk to producers, often outside of the projects that Steve and I and others have going on. But so thinking about in the context of soil health, I remember one of the first talks I gave to producers that a producer conference, oh, my gosh, probably December 2016. And I got a lot of eye rolls, when I was talking about soil health, because a lot of the there was probably over 100 producers in this room out in Fort Morgan, Colorado, lots of eye rolls. So I realized quickly that there had to be a better way to get the point across that soil health is important. And so coming back to the point I made at the beginning of the podcast about human health, people really can understand human health. And maybe they can't wrap their heads around soil health. But when you make that analogy, and that comparison, it is very simple for people to see where we're coming from in terms of soil health, and that's worked really, really well for me for the last probably four years. I don't know have you run into those issues, Steve?

STEVE BLECKER 31:56

I generally, we, I kind of take this a little different direction. We rely heavily on our CSU Extension program in the state. And they tend to have experts, agronomy type experts in different parts of the state that have experience in different agroecosystems. And these are folks that have developed relationships with producers in the area. So they trust you know, they've built up this level of trust with the producers. So we we rely on them to kind of also help get out the message between them in our we haven't Well, I worked for the Ag Experiment Station. So I have about eight Ag Experiment Station set up across the state where they have field days, and we can bring in producers and to kind of explain the research and they can see firsthand Hey, you know, we tried this different tillage method. This is what happened. And so that's kind of, so I rely mostly on all these other people in the field.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:57

Let's talk about you mentioned agroecosystems. And so let's get into kind of the, the meat of the conversation here. You have this large federally funded grants project here in dealing with agroecosystem management practices and improvements to that and how it connects to soil health and Ecosystem Sustainability resiliency. Can you give us a little background on to this this project and how it came to be and, and just kind of Yeah, introduce us to, to what you're hoping to do here?

JIM IPPOLITO 33:33

Yeah. We got lucky! I can tell you, there's there's more than just luck involved. But when we started in Colorado, this soil health push, really the push the most recent push started in 2019, July 2019. And there was a lot of people interested in soil health, and that got whittled down to a number of different subsets. And the subset that Steve and I run in, we have a core group of people myself, Steve, Dr. Megan mock molar. We have two people from a consulting company called Groundup consulting. That's Max Neumayer. And, and Helen silver. And then we have a couple of postdocs, we have at least one postdoc, but the core that I just mentioned, we work really, really well together. And some people in our group have strengths and weaknesses just like everybody else. I think we have a pretty good handle on who has strengths and who has weaknesses in different sectors. And when I think about being successful, Steve and I, and and Megan, Mark Miller, we have the science down. No, no doubt about it. We're really good at what we do in terms of science. I don't want to sound like, arrogant or anything, but we're, we've done this for a long time. So I think we're really good at what we do. One of the things I think scientists sometimes struggle with is being creative in terms of writing, right? I mean, it just happened. So we have Max and Helen that are creative wizards. And they can put together a proposal that is just really good looking. And we've been very successful. So we do the science, we write the science, and then they write the, the other portion that makes it look sexy, to be honest with you. And we have been so successful, I think we're running off of a total of 30 million, 34 million? I can't remember, I've lost track of the number. We have this climate smart commodities grant that totals something like 25 million. It's not all coming to Colorado State University, because it's split among different entities. But it's 25 million. And we had another one federal Conservation Innovation Grant, that was I think, 3.4 million, and then a few others, and they've built upon one another to the point where we've landed this climate smart commodities grant. And we're looking to the future to keep doing what we're doing now just on, you know, either in Colorado or outside of Colorado.

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:20

And I want to I want to come back to that, because one of the questions I wanted to ask, is it when you're talking about funding, because I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of, you know, do or die when it comes to grant writing and looking for funding and all those kinds of things. And, and so one of the questions was that, that maybe we can come back to her, you can answer it now. And we can splice it in later. But, but what what makes these kinds of large projects attractive for funding? So you talked about you have, you know, you wrote it the science, you had somebody, you know, some some folks make it sound sexy, and those kinds of things, what are what are some of the things that you felt were key to, to, to attracting funding from, from these these, you know, government programs or, or funding agencies?

STEVE BLECKER 37:10

Well, I think the key for this climate smart commodities Grant was the fact that we've built this program, from the ground up hand in hand with producers, and we've been lucky to score or land or receive relatively smaller grants that have led to bigger grants that have led to this climate smart commodities grant. So you know, being successful in grant development, and grant receiving is building a program. And we've been lucky enough to build this program. And so you write a grant, like the climate smart commodities grant, and you can put data into that grant that you have from previous grants that are focused on identical topics. And we so we, to be successful, we've been really focused, like our group has been completely focused on soil health. And when you build out something this large, you have to bring other people on board. And I'm a scientist, Steve's a scientist, I won't speak for him. But we've brought in sociologist, to take a look at how this star program will develop and unfold on a socio-scale or socio economic scale. And I can't do that. I don't want to do that. So we have sociologists and economists that are going to do that for us. And so that just makes this project this much bigger,

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:23

Got it, so let's let's get into let's yeah, dive into the weeds. What are what are the main, you know, problems or questions that you're you're looking to, to answer or dig into when it comes to the project here?

STEVE BLECKER 38:38

Well, there's a there's a project I'm working on, it's kind of it's outside of these STAR programs. But it's it's soil health, because that's what we do around here, apparently. But yeah, we're looking at this project. We're looking at degraded range lands in southeastern Colorado. In just different conditions where they've been overgrazed in the past. And there's also there's a trend, I won't go into a lot of detail, but the municipalities, I mean, water as water becomes more and more scarce and more expensive. There's lands that are bought up that used to be irrigated, but then they're just allowed to kind of return returned to a dryland state, because they the cities want to use the water for something else like municipalities. So then, you know, you're left with a task of so what did we do to these lands that are no longer being irrigated? You know, how do we kind of improve them? You know, do we incorporate grazing or what kind of amendments can we add? So it's been a it's been an interesting challenge, but we've been going out working with these ranchers, it's been kind of a almost a bottom up approach. It's like go out to them and say, Hey, show me some fields that you're having problems with, you know, we'll kind of talk about why and then we, we've set up some plots on some of these kind of degraded or, for lack of a better There were areas, and we're just trying some different techniques to see, you know, if we can improve the productivity of the range land. Further, these are all, you know, grazed cattle graze lands.

STEVE BLECKER 40:13

Let me, let me add something about our our bigger picture across the state of Colorado. So what we're trying to do, and this is complicated, because I can't give you a really good answer as to what we're going to find, I guess that's the premise behind the sciences, you know, it's exciting that it's new. And so what we're trying to do is look at across the state of Colorado, and adjacent states, what management practices work, and which ones don't, in terms of improving soil health, and concomitant concomitantly improving soil water, or available soil water. So these two go hand in hand, that's really what we're doing, you know, to be honest with you, if you're gonna take up like a 30,000 foot view, look on the projects that we're running, it's really all about water, especially in the Western US. And soil health is just tagging along for the ride, to be honest with you. But we are looking at trying to improve soils, so they're resilient and sustainable, and can hold on to water for a longer period of time and supply water to crops. And so we're trying to find sweet spots in terms of management practices across the state. And so the idea is, this is just an idea, not sure if this is how this is going to work out or not. But we break the state down into different types of cropping systems or agroecosystems, or we break the state down into different eco-regions, or we break the state down into some other type of format that makes sense. So we can piece this soil health, water health or water quality or water quantity, puzzle together to help producers across the state of Colorado, and I don't know how it's going to flush out but it's going to flush out one way or the other.

STEVE BLECKER 42:01

I was just gonna say, no matter how we end up breaking it out. I mean, the big, the big hurdle is always variability. Because there'd be there's variability in soils, even within these different practices, their variability, I mean, like, if people use different kind of cover crops, there's different kinds of tillage practices, even on a conservation tillage side of things. So that's why we're trying to, you know, that's always going to be a struggle, but we're trying to try to get hundreds of growers involved in this. So we can at least maybe kind of get slightly, you know, kind of clear things up a little bit, maybe in some of these different systems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 42:36

Right, right. So what are some of the, I guess? What are some of the parameters then that you are looking at? And and how are you? How are you getting at them? How are you measuring and quantifying those?

STEVE BLECKER 42:51

Well, we're, we're certainly casting a large net. And that's the beauty of doing research is, you know, if you have the funding, you can cast a large net. And so we're doing this on purpose, because we want to collect more data then not enough data. And so right, if you're in the sciences field, like Steve and I have been in for over 30 years, you always, invariably look over your shoulder and say, "I should have I should have collected this, I should have collected that". So with these projects, I I feel like we haven't, we won't do that we won't look over our shoulder and say we should have done this because we're doing it. And we're collecting a lot of data. With the hopes to widdle the data set down to something manageable for producers in the state of Colorado. We're collecting soil physical characteristics, biological characteristics, chemical characteristics, nutrient characteristics we're collecting. Sooner or later, we're going to be collecting some microbiome characteristics, which are a little bit outside of against both of our expertise. But we have other people that will be doing this for us to put a puzzle together that makes sense, across however, we break this out across the state.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:03

So say for instance, if you're if you're dealing you're you're measuring all the various soil characteristics, let's break that down. What are what are some of the those characteristics that you're measuring? How are you measuring those?

STEVE BLECKER 44:14

Yeah, well, there's things like aggregate stability, I mean, you can you take a soil sample and all the stuff you take back to the lab, right, and you're doing some sort of extraction, but like what aggregate stability, there's a, in a civil engineering department build a device that Jim uses in his lab to basically it just kind of agitates the sample over time and you see how well it holds together. And yeah, there's different extracts to pull out you know, like what kind of nutrients are available to plants, nitrogen, phosphorus, all the major nutrients like that, it might end micronutrient micronutrients as well.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:50

Right.

STEVE BLECKER 44:52

Yeah, on the, you know, in addition to water, aggregate or wet aggregate stability, we measure bulk density So actually collect a sample that's separate from all the other samples we collect in the field to measure how dense or how dense the soil is, I guess it's the bulk density. We collect soils for in terms of biological, we're looking at currently, well organic carbon is at the center. And then we look at microbial biomass carbon, we look at something called beta glucose oxidase activity, which is a measurement. It's an enzyme assay for how easily micro organisms can degrade cellulosic material and soil. So like some of the basics are relatively easy materials to decompose. We look at something called and Steve alluded to this, we look at potentially mineralized double nitrogen. So how much nitrogen is present in an organic form that can be mineralized over a certain period of time? Yeah, and we've looked at other assays in the past some enzyme assays but where I think we're at least the climate smart commodities, we might be doing some microbiome type assays where we're looking at structure and function of microorganisms within systems. And then, of course, we're looking at pH and electrical conductivity. And like Steve mentioned, nutrient concentrations, both macro and micronutrients. And there's there's probably some other things Oh, water holding capacity in the lab on like, pressure plates. We're supposedly doing that as well. It, it's a big list. Yeah.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:31

Yeah. So So with that, with that big list? I mean, what then are you've talked about dealing with collecting, collecting a bunch of data, you've talked about, you know, the spatial variability or variability with you know, land use? Are are there any, I guess, what would you consider your your biggest hurdle in, in putting out this large amount of of instrumentation or collecting all this, this this data here? Is it? Is it is it the time is it? Is it just the I mean, you've you've, you've got the funding now. So you can, you can purchase the equipment, you can pay for that time, but are there are there other things that that you see, that you have seen or foresee as as major hurdles. In collecting all of this data?

STEVE BLECKER 47:18

The soil moisture monitoring, in these agroecosystems, you got to deal with, these aren't like, like some are like a forest right, we can just put these in the ground and walk away. There's, these are actively, you know, managed fields that are being tilled, and all these other practices. So when we started out, we were putting these systems like right in the middle of the field, because, you know, we wanted to get like the best representative spot we could find. But you know, then they get knocked over and damaged. And we'd have to pull them back out, depending on whether they were harvesting or tilling. And that was only with like, 10 or 12 sites. But now that we've got network, we're ramping this up with dozens and dozens of sites, we tried to, we really had to think about a different way to do this. So we just were working with METER to kind of, I mean, basically, we just extended the cables. So we can put the logger in at the edge of the field and then run the cable in. And then we work with the grower to try to find a depth. We usually put them in at six inches, but we try to find a depth that we can leave them in, right, hopefully for the duration of the project for three or four years. Because it's just we just logistically it's just too hard to run back and forth. Installing and uninstalling. So yes, yeah, it's been challenging.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:31

Yeah.

STEVE BLECKER 48:32

And Colorado is such a big state that if you have a site like we do, we're going to be installing these at locations that are eight hours from Fort Collins. So if something goes sideways, to jump in a car and drive eight hours to splice a cable together, and then drive eight hours back is a real challenge. So yeah, Steve's taking the lead on this. Well, and it's been great because we bought a trencher to to help with the installments. Because if we have 500 of these devices to put out. Yeah, unless you want like really big forearms like Popeye or something. I mean, trenchers are really handy. I think, you know, I'm a lab rat mostly. And I think about the bottleneck on that side is just Hance having people. So the climate smart commodities grant when it starts rolling, some sometime next year, we're going to have about 300, almost 400 soil samples come back into the lab. And all that analysis needs to be done and I can tell you from experience that that will take at least a year to get done with the people that we have, so we need to hire more people. And I know our space is limited, so we need more space. So fun.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:53

So So what are the I mean we can talk about any preliminary results that you But, but what are the primary hypotheses that you're testing? Or do? I guess? What your, your expectations with with connecting, like you said, connecting these, you know agroecosystem management practices to soil health and Ecosystem Sustainability resiliency?

JIM IPPOLITO 50:24

Yeah, that's a good question I picked up on the word hypothesis. And so this, this is a tough one to crack because, you know, it's a general hypothesis. But if a producer is following one of the, or all of the five principles of soil health, the hypothesis would be that soil health would increase in a system, right? And that's a cheesy answer. But that's, that's the answer I can give you. Because the way we've set this, this whole project up, and the STAR program in Colorado, is to allow the producer to make the decision on what they want to change in terms of management. So it's flipping the research upside down, to be honest with you, you know, as researchers, we come up with the ideas and hypotheses and then we, we set up the project and test them, but we're not doing that in this project, the farmers, they're installing the new management practice, and then we just, we kind of go with it. So in some respects, we're flying a little bit without a hypothesis.

BRAD NEWBOLD 51:28

Kind of exploratory research.

STEVE BLECKER 51:31

Yeah. And things like I mean, we're always trying to improve or increase organic matter in the soil. But that can take a while. Yeah, it can, you know, it can exceed the life of a grant. So it's kind of so you might not see the, you know, these changes within three years, right, just you know, you wouldn't necessarily expect to but, so that makes it kind of challenging.

JIM IPPOLITO 51:53

You know, one of the nice things about the climates where commodities grant is, I think we could potentially eke out five years with us. And so from my experience, having worked in Colorado for a really long period of time, you know, these are the places where if you're going to see a change in carbon, you're going to see a change in carbon in the western US if you do something positive. And that's because our carbon content is organic carbon content is so low to begin with. So if you make an incremental change, it could be huge to be honest with you, you know, if you go from 1.5 to 2%, that's, that's huge, it's only half a percent change. But if you do that, in a system that has low carbon to begin with, like in Colorado, you're going to see more of an improvement than if you went for a half percent change in carbon content in a soil in Minnesota, that already starts with seven and a half percent carbon. So this is where I, my gut is telling me that this is where we're going to see the best bang for our buck, in terms of return on investment, for improving carbon in our soils, it's going to be in the Western United States, we're going to see drastic improvements. And I'll tell you from some of my experiences with other soil health projects, that if you do things, quote, right, you might see a change in less than five years. In fact, we had a project over on the western slope of Colorado, where we saw changes in three years in terms of organic carbon accumulation in the soil surface in three years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 53:21

Have you have you had any, any issues or challenges in in collaborating with with, I guess, again, the the idea of the collaboration between growers and academics? Within this this project itself? We talked about communication with with them, are you is this is this something? Well, let me back this up. Are, are these when you're going out? Are and installing or measuring? The assumption is that you're working with growers and not just on experimental fields is Is that Is that correct?

STEVE BLECKER 53:55

Yeah, we have, most of these are, these are their fields. Yeah, used to grow, what they're grown. And we, and we utilize, we didn't really bring up the we have a series of conservation districts throughout the state of Colorado, and, and other entities like that. But it's kind of up to them, and they apply to the Department of Ag and say, Hey, we want to, we think we can bring on 10 producers or our conservation district. So then, so we rely on these guys to you know, who already have these relationships with the growers built this trust. So I mean, it makes a big difference. And they, you know, again, the producers don't have to, it's all voluntary, so.

BRAD NEWBOLD 54:36

Right, right. And, Jim, you talked about the, you know, you know, potentially increasing carbon by, you know, there in the in, in the semi arid west by, you know, half a percent would be huge, but do you see other other potential impacts of, of projects like these, this project or projects like these on on agriculture, and I guess Have the implications for, for Colorado, the region and maybe potentially the world at large?

JIM IPPOLITO 55:07

Well, I do and I, when you ask a question like that, I come immediately back to the STAR program. And so I recently moved from Colorado State University to Ohio State University. And I'm trying to instill the STAR program within some proposals that we're writing currently to expand this idea of using star to quantify soil health, not only in Colorado, but then, of course, the western US with this climate smart commodities grant, but bringing that concept to the Midwest. And so there's, there's some real opportunities. And we, in Colorado did a, I think, a really good job developing that program, to the point where, you know, can't I don't think be lifted directly out of Colorado. But you could take that and then tweak the content in the STAR program to a particular state or region across the United States, and probably the globe, to be honest with you. That's, I think that's the benefit of what we've done in the state of Colorado.

STEVE BLECKER 56:10

And I would just add that, I mean, the one thing we haven't talked about is erosion. I mean, all these practices help keep the soil in place, and can have soil health without soil. So keeping litter on the surface, if you're, you know, all these different practices, cover crops, having that living root in there, just kind of anchoring the soil, keeping it around things that, you know, didn't happen back in the dustbowl days.

BRAD NEWBOLD 56:32

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So looking at let's see, Jim, you said you might be able to stretch this out to five years, a five year project, but looking looking there at the end, or even, I guess, looking into the future, what do you see as the future of this research? What do you see? You've talked about expanding, growing, expanding projects and building project upon project? And what do you see as the future of of this research project as it moves forward?

JIM IPPOLITO 57:00

Yeah, that's a great question. So the climate smart commodities project is really mostly Colorado centric. But it also encompasses five states that abut the Rocky Mountain backbone. So New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, all the land grant institutions within those five states and Colorado State University, are working on this project. So the concept is, we've built we've built a really strong program focused on soil health in the STAR program in Colorado. And we want to send feelers out to these adjacent states to see if something like this would work in those states. And to be honest with you, Max Neumayer, and Helen silver, have already held discussions with the state of Wyoming. And they're putting they're putting together a soil health program, much like in Colorado, and they've reached out to other states, I know they're working in the state of Washington to do the same thing. And the state of Washington is on the periphery of the climate smart commodities project. But the the concept is, is to not make this Colorado centric, but make it Western centric, and then make it nation centric. So we actually have help, we, there's people that are working on this at the STAR, center location, or whatever you would call it in Illinois, to make this a reality across the US. That's what I'd like to see. That would be really cool.

BRAD NEWBOLD 58:28

Steve, any thoughts on the future of this kind of research?

STEVE BLECKER 58:34

Other than just I mean, the more we can make this data available to the producers, and show them that, hey, it really works, you know, and hopefully, not only does it work, but hopefully they'll be seeing increases in yield as their soil health improves, because I mean, that's the bottom line. I mean, they're not gonna mean they're not growing soil, they're growing crops, right. But, of course, you need good soil to get a good crop. So hopefully, this this will go hand in hand, as they improve the soil, they'll see yields increasing, and they won't just, you know, try it on one field, you know, adopt it over larger portions of their operation.

BRAD NEWBOLD 59:11

Right.

JIM IPPOLITO 59:12

I'll just add to this. So, the dream, this is probably pretty crazy. That's a crazy statement coming from somebody who writes proposals to bring in research dollars to do work. But the dream would be to not have to work on soil health ever again. And that may sound crazy. But imagine if you could develop a program that just fine tuned every single system to number or a short set of indicators that we know tell you the story of soil health, or if you could use the star forms that this is what we're going to do. We're going to match up the STAR forms data to the data we collect in the laboratory. And imagine if you could take just a form that producer fills out, that would tell you what the health of the soil is without having to do the work in the lab. To me, that is really what I'd like to see happen. So people like myself and Steve and others, we can start focusing on other topics of importance. And keep this simple. If there could be a simple there probably is not a simple but that's the dream. Right.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:00:27

Right. Well, any other final thoughts or other things that you'd like to share with our audience about what we've talked about or beyond what we've talked about here?

JIM IPPOLITO 1:00:39

I'll tell you, we're, we're working. And this is outside of the climate smart commodities. But you know, Steve mentioned his work in range lands, these degraded range lands. And so we actually have a soil health program where we're looking at using soil health principles and practices and quantification in mind land reclamation, which is really fun, because those systems are really they're like, these degraded range lands that Steve's working on, they're just very wacky, you know, they may be contaminated with heavy metals beyond the point where plants can grow. And so looking at practices to improve these to grow something to reduce erosion, like Steve mentioned, and to improve soil health and Plant Health, and hopefully animal health, because bracing, you know, grazing animals come through these areas, and ultimately, environmental health. So it's like a One Health concept, if you will. This is what we do.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:01:32

Yeah, I think we're out of time. But maybe we'll have you back to talk more about Yeah, range lands and reclaimed mining and biogeochemical cycling and forever chemicals and all that kind of stuff. So anyway, those are fun things for for potential future episodes. We'll see. All right. I think that's it. Our time's up for today. Thanks again, Steve. And, Jim, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. And it's been a great conversation. So thanks again. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Taylor Bacon is a Ph.D. student of soil and crop science at Colorado State University. She obtained her Bachelor’s in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University with a focus on energy and the environment and a minor in sustainable energy. As a Ph.D. candidate, she is researching nature-based climate solutions, land-use emissions, and food/energy systems.

Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

TAYLOR BACON 0:08

I think one of the hardest things we ran into was when we were initially designing this research plan and kind of deciding what data we wanted to collect. Deciding what sensors we wanted to use, where we wanted to install them, is that there is so much heterogeneity and variation within the solar array, even just within a single block of panels across even just a couple feet apart because of these different zones. And it was challenging to balance okay, what can we feasibly measure and what how much data can we feasibly collect, while still capturing enough of this variability to actually be accurate and to have representative data?

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:53

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today's guest is Taylor Bacon, a PhD student in the Department of soil and crop Sciences at Colorado State University. She obtained her bachelor's degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Princeton University with a focus on energy and the environment, and a minor in sustainable energy. Now, as a part of her Ph. D program, she's researching nature based climate solutions, land use emissions, and food energy systems. And today, she's here to talk about her research into agriculture ticks, regenerative energy, and land use, and much more. So Taylor, thanks so much for being here.

TAYLOR BACON 1:42

Thank you so much for having me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:44

So today, we wanted to talk with you about your your projects and research interests. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into to where you are now with environmental sciences and into your your specialty, and you're a PhD researcher?

TAYLOR BACON 2:02

Yeah, so as you mentioned in the intro, my background is actually in engineering, I did my undergrad in chemical and biological engineering, focusing on sustainable energy. And my undergrad thesis was looking at bio energy for jet fuel production as kind of a sustainable alternative. But my senior year, I took an environmental policy class, and really just had this moment of being like, Oh, this is what we need to actually make these technical solutions I've been studying and work on happen in the real world, and we can be doing the research. But if there isn't the policy to actually drive that into implementation, that's kind of a missing piece. So I got really interested in environmental policy. And after graduating, got a fellowship at an environmental nonprofit working on climate and clean air and energy policy, and spent a couple of years doing that. And it was really, really valuable experience, I learned a ton and kind of developed an understanding of how all of these drivers work together and kind of what actually has to happen for change towards a like sustainable climate future. But after I was there for like three years, and towards the end, I of my second or third year, I started really missing science and kind of more quantitative work, I was doing a lot of policy analysis and advocacy, but kind of was itching to get back towards the more quantitative side of things, started thinking about what I wanted to do next, and had a couple criteria, I wanted to do something where I could do fieldwork outside and physically be collecting data and kind of be more on the ground. At an actual place collecting actual data after doing a lot of kind of modeling and high level analysis. I wanted to do something that was really solutions oriented. So I wanted to be doing science, but I wanted to be working on science that was kind of directly applicable to these problems we're facing and was really solutions oriented. And then I'd taken a bunch of environmental chemistry classes and undergrad and started kind of looking in that space and found my way to this soil science program that kind of matched all of those criteria. And this project specifically that I'm working on in Agra voltaic is really exciting because it kind of matches my background and sustainable energy and energy policy with this soil ecology biogeochemistry side of things that I'm more recently getting into.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:40

That's awesome. That's super cool. I want to I want to touch on all of that. So but yeah, so can we can we go back you you've mentioned that in your undergrad research and I definitely want to dig into what you're doing. Now. That's going to be the bulk of what we want to talk about today. But it. But you've talked about working with with biofuels and doing research in that aspect. And you said bio jet fuels. That's something that that I am not sure if I'm familiar with, in general with biofuels, but not bio jet fuels. Can you tell us a little bit about about that, and how, how that works with I mean, with jet fuel, it's very, it needs to be, you know, very high quality. And, you know, a lot of more, a lot of other things like that. But can you tell us a little bit about that?

TAYLOR BACON 5:31

Yeah, so this was a while ago, so I'm a little a little removed from the weeds. But the idea, or kind of the motivation for this project was that we can electrify a lot of things. And electrification is a really good option for decarbonizing a lot of different sectors of the economy and a lot of different modes of transportation. But large scale electric aircraft are probably pretty far down the line. But in the meantime, we have technological options for creating jet fuel from plant residue from different plant based sources, that when you're growing that feedstock, you're sequestering carbon. So the idea is that then your your bio jet fuel is carbon neutral, because the emissions that are released are balanced out by the carbon that sequestered when the plant is growing. So my thesis was using chemical engineering modeling software to design and model a pathway for converting, I looked specifically at forestry residue as kind of a sample feedstock that has a little bit maybe a little bit better sustainability on the front end, because you're not displacing agriculture, or kind of it's this material that's already there. And there's definitely limitations and collecting it and accessing it. But that's what I use as my feedstock and then designed in model this process. And this modeling software for converting it to a jet fuel, in theory could be used as a drop in jet fuel in existing infrastructure. But didn't economic analysis and was basically like, this is not feasible unless you have really ambitious carbon credits and a lot of policy support, which kind of tied back into the turning of my attention to environmental policy.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:21

Right. So with that, I mean, I would assume that if, if you have a an undergrad at Princeton, who is interested in the stuff that I'm sure there's plenty of other organizations and corporations that are dealing with, you know, biofuel research and those kinds of things. How did that tie into to what the I guess the existing research and kind of research and development was, has been doing in that in that field?

TAYLOR BACON 7:46

Yeah, it was actually really great, because there was a company actually based in Oregon, called Red Rock biofuels, that were just starting to try and design and build and implement, I think the the plant was maybe just starting construction when I was working on my thesis for a very similar pathway. So I got to connect with them and chat about their work a little bit. And then there's a bio jet or not a jet fuel, but just a biofuel plant in Iowa. That's one of the only commercially operational ones in the US, I believe, or at least was at the time. So I got funding from Princeton to go to or that plant and kind of see what they were doing. So I definitely, yeah, I did my best to kind of see what was actually happening and kind of where this fit in with what other people were doing. And there were definitely other companies that were kind of starting out on the same path that I was looking at. And we're, we're definitely ahead of what I was doing, because they were actually building a plant rather than just modeling it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:49

Right. Right. So is that something then art? I mean, I guess, probably not in the commercial space, what are there then, I mean, you know, aircraft jet engines that are running off of biofuel, or like mixed or hybrid fields.

TAYLOR BACON 9:04

I think United has been doing a lot on sourcing their jet fuel and incorporating biojet fuel. So it's definitely a pretty small fraction. But there are a lot of people working on kind of setting targets and moving towards having it be more prevalent. And I think there are some airlines that as kind of a way of supporting these pretty young technologies and young plants will agree to buy a certain amount of biofuel, and that can kind of serve as a financing guarantee to actually get these things off the ground.

BRAD NEWBOLD 9:39

That's awesome. That's cool. That's fun to see. I mean, it's one of those things where Well, I think a lot of a lot of what's interesting with with what we're going to be talking about today and with your research is that is that there are a lot of things that that we have that are going on right now. That do have that huge potential for for greater impact when it comes to the environment, and the climate, and you know lots of other things that are tied to those as well. So I think that's I think that's, that's really interesting. So you, you went from doing kind of more of the hard science research, you said that you went into policy, and kind of environmental law, environmental policy, those kinds of things. What What made you want to switch from and you said, You switched back, but what made you want to really get in and dig into environmental policy? And you started working with the Environmental Defense Fund there, it's based out of DC, so how, how did that that, yeah, that changing trajectory happen for you?

TAYLOR BACON 10:51

Yeah, I think there were two big pieces. The first was the environmental policy class, I took my last year at Princeton, and my, or the the professor teaching that class had been had worked at the EPA and been really involved in the Kyoto Protocol. And it was really, really powerful to hear her experience as a science, kind of as a scientist, being involved in this really important policy. And just kind of made me start thinking about, Okay, well, we have the technical solutions. And a lot of times, that's not the limiting factor, like, we have the technical know how to do a lot more than we're doing currently. So we're like, why is there this gap? And that class, kind of like, okay, well, there's all of these regular regulatory networks and frameworks and policy kind of support that needs to be there for these things to actually be making a difference. And I graduated during the Trump administration, and all of these kinds of climate, things felt like they were falling apart. And my, my feeling when I graduated was that like, I don't want to be doing research kind of isolated from what's actually going on, I want to be working on solutions and kind of actually implementing these things. And tied with my thesis that we were just talking about. I had designed and modeled this pathway and kind of said, Okay, these are the carbon emissions, this is the benefit. But it's not feasible unless you have this really strong policy support. And, but yeah, between my thesis experience in this class I took, I was just really eager to do something that was kind of more on the ground. And a friend sent me the listing for this fellowship at the Environmental Defense Fund and kind of said, this seems like it would be up your alley. And I was, yeah, very excited to have the opportunity to kind of see what was going on in the policy where we're old. And I started out in DC, and it was super incredible to be going to congressional hearings and testifying at the EPA, and really kind of be in the middle of the environmental policy world and see what it actually meant to have policy that supported these technical solutions.

BRAD NEWBOLD 13:15

So you actually got to be be there communicating? So so it seems, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, so you were working behind the scenes with doing research, as well as as kind of not necessarily creating policy, but but suggestions and guidelines for for policy makers, and then being able to communicate that to to, you know, I guess the decision makers, potentially as well, is that is that kind of your your, what your roles were there?

TAYLOR BACON 13:43

Yeah, I did a lot of research on policy and different policy options. And then a lot, I worked on a team that was predominantly lawyers who are involved in EPA regulatory action. So it was a lot of writing comments and kind of staying involved in these EPA processes, which are designed to have a lot of public feedback. But most people don't have time to read these super extensive dockets and submit comments and testify. So EDF did a lot of that work is and kind of pushing forward these these regulations in a way that would help climate and energy and air quality.

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:25

I think that's, that's something that well, it ties into to some themes that we've had with a lot of our guests when it comes to kind of the your different roles, your varying roles when it comes to you know, scientific research where you have the different ways that you're trying to communicate your your findings or your understandings, or the or even just communicating the data or your interpretations of the data. Did you did you feel that that? It was let me back this up? What were the differences that you felt in being able to To communicate whether difficulties or, you know, ease of communication when it came to communicating within, you know, the scientific the research world versus communicating with policymakers versus even communicating with the with a general lay audience if you had the opportunity as well.

TAYLOR BACON 15:18

Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap in that you, the, your goals for the communication are tailored to your audience. But you are still making very intentional choices about how you're communicating what information you're clued, including how you're framing it for that audience. So I think the skill of like honing a message for an audience was really applicable across the the range of people you're talking to. I think learning to communicate for to the general public, for kind of a more broad audience was really helpful. I think science communication, when you're in the weeds, and you're kind of really getting into the meat of an issue is almost easier, because you can just kind of say everything that you know, but for the general audience, it was a really helpful exercise in thinking about, Okay, what's the most important thing like how can I make this relatable? Or make it clear that this is important? Why is it important? And I had the opportunity to write blogs for EDF a lot, which was great for my writing skills and like communication skills, and I definitely have carried a lot of those into my PhD program.

BRAD NEWBOLD 16:32

That's awesome. Yeah, that's definitely something that I think, I mean, everybody can, can work on communication skills, right? Whether it's interpersonal, whether it's, you know, to larger, broader audiences as well. But especially in dealing with with those in the scientific research community, or research and development, or whatever, and being able to really, I think, really hone in on, on what, what it is not only what you want to convey, but yeah, what your audience who your audience is, like, like you said, who your audience is, what kind of what kind of level, are they going to be able to really grasp the, you know, your findings, your conclusions, or the, I guess the the direction that you that you want that conversation to go as well. I think that's again, that's, that's something that that is, it is, you know, key for, for anybody who's in the sciences, to be able to communicate to a broader audience, not just within their bubble of academia or whatever it may be. So, so from from there, how long were you at the EDF?

TAYLOR BACON 17:47

I was there for just shy of three years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:50

just shy of three years. So again, switching what made you want to switch and and move again, from, you know, the world of DC and policymaking and other things back into, into kind of the hard science and research and and back into academic research.

TAYLOR BACON 18:07

Yeah, when I finished my undergrad, I kind of was of the mind that I was never going back to school, I had had enough I was just ready to be in the real world. And then after a couple years at EDF, I loved my time at EDF and had such incredible, incredible colleagues and learned so much. And I think I always was like, oh, yeah, environmental policy is really important. And then kind of saw what it actually meant and what environmental policy looks like when you're actually implementing it. But I just missed the more quantitative quantitative side of things. I was doing a lot of writing and, and kind of softer research, like reading a lot of policies looking at policy impacts, but was working with consultants who were the ones who were doing a lot of the the more quantitative work and analyzing outcomes of different policies a little more quantitatively. And EDF is a really unique organization in that it has a lot of PhD scientists on staff who are doing research but in a way that is kind of focused towards policy, relevant research and really solutions oriented. And I was part of a early career scientist mentorship program at EDF and was paired with a really incredible climate scientist and had the opportunity to hear about her experience as a PhD scientist, and she actually did her PhD at Princeton. So it was fun to chat about New Jersey. But yeah, I think the combination of kind of feeling feeling the itch to do something a little more quantitative and seeing these role models who had this mix of the science and the policy that I was really interested in, made me go reconsider my my initial stance that I was never going to go back to school and start looking into grad school programs where I could hopefully work towards a similar career path.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:09

Right. Right. So, so thinking long term end goal. So is is that is that something that you would like to do when you're done with your your PhD work is to kind of move back into the policy world.

TAYLOR BACON 20:22

That's the goal, something, I mean, I still want to be doing research and have that be a really central part of my career. But I really admire the scientists who are both scientists and advocates and are doing really important science. But don't stop there and kind of move that science forward towards like, this is how we can use this this. This is what it means. So yeah, something like that either at an environmental nonprofit or government agency or something like enroll the National Renewable Energy Lab where they are doing a lot of really policy relevant research, that that would be the dream someday.

BRAD NEWBOLD 21:00

Good. Good. Well, good luck with that. So what took you then what, what drew you to Colorado State University where you're at now?

TAYLOR BACON 21:10

Um, so I had been living in Colorado for the last two years of my fellowship at EDF. EDF has a boulder office. And I'm from New Mexico originally. So it worked out well to be a little closer to home and in the mountains with lots of good trail running. So I was looking at a pretty narrow set of schools to begin with. And CSU has a really incredible kind of soil ecology biogeochemistry school or departments. And there's a lot of faculty, including my advisor doing really incredible research in that space. And I reached out to a bunch of professors at a bunch of different schools and just had a lot of conversations about people's research, and ended up finding Keith Pashtun at CSU and he had this agricole takes project that seemed like it was a really good fit for my background, and everything just kind of fell into place into place.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:10

That's awesome. Really quick, do you miss the humidity of back East?

TAYLOR BACON 22:17

No, I I do not miss the East Coast, a lot of my friends are there. So I go back to visit. But growing up in New Mexico, like 20% Humidity was a humid day. So it was definitely an adjustment. And I, I do not miss it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:36

So with your aside from from your project, and we'll we'll get to that that next, were you able to kind of mold your your coursework that you've been working on and your your program itself around around this, this idea of, of, I guess, either renewable energy, regenerative energy, you know, those kinds of things there.

TAYLOR BACON 23:00

Yeah, that's been one of my favorite things about the like a PhD program in general so far is that there are effectively no requirements. And every course that I choose to take is just kind of working towards what I'm interested in and what my goals are. And I actually have the opportunity to be part of this very, very cool fellowship program at CSU, that's funded by the National Science Foundation and is called inner fuse, which is the interdisciplinary training, education and research and food energy water systems. So it's this really interdisciplinary group of students from all over the University, studying food, energy, water systems, and kind of a climate future, which is kind of exactly where I want to be, especially with the food energy, intersection. And there's specific coursework that goes with the fellowship that's focused on the kind of systems thinking and systems analysis. And you're taking these classes with people from totally different backgrounds, totally different research. So that's been really, really valuable from a coursework perspective, and then starting to take a lot of the more soil ecology, biology, okay, biogeochemistry classes, since that's not something I have as much background in. And yeah, it's just been really great to be able to kind of pick the the types of classes from the big systems level classes to the what is happening on a tiny, tiny molecular level in the soil, and kind of bring those all together in this research project.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:33

That's really cool. I have a soft spot for interdisciplinary research, and fellowships and those kinds of things. I was a part of one back in my day, and it was really, really cool. Just be able to, because a lot of times, we kind of get in and this this goes for anybody. I mean, any of you in the audience who's listening to this, like we often will get into our own bubble of and we think you As the work that we're doing is really important. And it it, it may very well be. But But there's so many other people that are thinking about things that might be tangentially related or even overlapping with what you are interested in, that are thinking of coming at it from a different perspective or even, you know, even might have different ideas or even just even just the the fact of, of being able to look at a problem with different sets of eyes. Is is really important to being able to, I guess, yeah, solve problems and come up with Yeah, solutions for a wide variety of, of different interests. So I think that's really cool. And yeah, I'm definitely a, an advocate for interdisciplinary research and collaboration. From yeah, whatever it may be, because they're there things too, and I'm sure that you've seen it, we can talk more about this about, about your project to about working with. Yeah, working with renewable energy, but then also you're incorporating, you know, the interests of of, you know, ranchers and of other folks who are who have different, I guess, different motives in mind, potentially, but all coming together to try to, to make things better for for, you know, the population as a whole, or, but starting small and working big, you know, so yeah, so I'm really happy that that all that is going on for you. So let's let's jump into to this main project, is this year, is this your dissertation project? Or is this kind of a precursor to it?

TAYLOR BACON 26:48

This is it. This is the dissertation project.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:51

This is the big one. All right. Cool. So yeah, just just talk to us a little bit about about cattle tracker and about Agri Voltex. And we want to get into Yeah, regenerative. You know, land use management, and all that kind of stuff. So wherever you want to start, feel free to jump in. And we can we can go from there.

TAYLOR BACON 27:15

Yeah, so I have the opportunity to work on a very cool project called cattle tracker. It's funded by the Department of Energy, Solar Energy Technology Office, and you were talking about interdisciplinary teams. And that's one of my favorite things about this project is. So broadly, our goal is to design a system to co locate regenerative cattle grazing with solar energy generation, there's been a huge build out in solar energy, and there needs to be a lot more to stay on track with climate goals. But there's often a lot of tension around land use, because solar requires so much more land than, like point source, like a coal fired power plant. So figuring out where these solar power plants are going, a lot of times they're displacing agricultural land, and that can have drawbacks. So in the last decade or so there's been a lot of research that is kind of questioning the idea that you can only do one or the other that you have to do agriculture or solar energy generation. And it's often referred to as agri voltaic. So the colocation of agriculture and so solar photovoltaics. And the research has looked at all sorts of different combinations. So everything from growing high value vegetable crops, to pollinator habitat to grazing, which is what we're focusing on. And because it's such a complex system, you have the animal side of things, you have the solar energy generation side of things, you have all of these ecosystem and ecological impacts. The team that we're working with on this project has folks from silicon Ranch, who are the principal investigators, and that's a solar company that is actually practicing solar grazing Agra voltaic systems and owns tons of solar power plants across the country and and kind of know that engineering and operations and management and maintenance side of things really well. And then we have on the CSU side of things, we have people who are working on biogeochemical models of what's happening and how the panels and the cattle and the soil and the vegetation is all interacting and what's happening beneath these panels. And we have animal welfare experts who are looking at okay, like what does this mean for the cattle? How are they interacting? We have our field site is located at a ranch called White Oak pastures in southwestern Georgia. So we have a lot of the ranch staff who are actually really managing the sheep and cattle that we're studying. So there's all of these different people from all of these different backgrounds working towards this, this goal of designing this cattle compatible solar system, which is really exciting.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:14

That's super cool. So, I mean, there's, there's lots of different ways we can go with this. I think that let's take, I guess, let's take a step back. And, and talk about because you were talking about how, you know, solar farms use a lot of land, I guess, what is kind of the baseline for, you know, solar farming right now, when it comes to when it comes to, you know, solar panels, and, and their, you know, their footprints on on the landscape? And I guess, and then, and then if you could talk about that as well as the environmental impact from because because a lot of times as we're dealing with, you know, with counteracting and mitigating climate change, we want to delve into renewable energy, which then I mean, solar is, is one of those primary energy sources. But at the same time, there are other environmental impacts from, you know, renewable energy sources as well, if you could just kind of dig into that a little bit there.

TAYLOR BACON 31:15

Yeah, I think that's really important. And that was one of the things that I was really excited about this project. Because I, EDF, I had been working on all this modeling and analysis and policy design, I was like, Okay, if we want to reach this percent reduction in carbon emissions by this year, this is the amount of solar we need. And it's one thing to say, Okay, we need however many megawatts gigawatts of solar. And it's another thing, my partner spent a summer working as a engineer on a solar power plant, and I went and visited him, and just seeing how big this solar power plant was, that was just like a fraction of the total that we needed. And it does, it totally alters the landscape, I think, the land where this one had been built had previously been cornfields, and that was just kind of a mud pit. And there's different soul different solar companies do it differently. And there's different impacts. And I think your question about what the impact of these solar power plants is, is something that people are like actively studying right now. And there's studies that are just starting to come out on kind of how the panel's change the dynamics, and a lot of that depends on what vegetation you're planting, and how you're managing the vegetation. So there's, there's a lot of variables that impact what solar panels are doing to the ecosystem and to the environment. And one of the big motivations for this project is, how can we do it better? Like how can we minimize any negative impacts, and maybe even have some positive impacts by pairing the regenerative grazing with the panels and hopefully improving soil health and vegetation productivity and indicators like that?

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:58

Yeah, I was gonna say, could you go into a little bit more detail with those with those impacts? Because I mean, you know, my assumption is that we're, you know, we're creating, you know, heat islands in, in these situations, or we're affecting that, you know, the microclimate there in that location. And, and we might say, Oh, it's, you know, it's just, you know, you know, a couple of acres or half an acre or whatever it may be. But then, again, you know, you have the butterfly effect, and so on. And so you have these small little microclimate sediment effects the regional climate around it. And yeah, other you know, other things, things like that.

TAYLOR BACON 33:35

Yeah, so the panels are really interesting, because you take this pretty homogeneous landscape, everything's getting the same sun, everything is getting the same water. And then when you install the panels, all of a sudden, it's very heterogeneous, and you have shading over certain areas and kind of redistribution of water, as water flows off one side of the panel or the other. And some areas aren't getting rain, some areas aren't getting, or are getting more rain than they would if it was just open because of the runoff. And air temperature is affected. It's kind of buffered from broader air temperature swings by the panels is what a lot of research is starting to show. There's been a couple papers suggesting that you maybe get some heat island effect, and there's a little bit of overall increase in air temperature, but I think that's also very climate dependent. And looking at, okay, what's the vegetation because having plants under the solar panels can actually cool them down a little bit and increase the efficiency of the panels. So it's, I think, the overall impact is really ecosystem dependent because you have the interactions of all of these different factors and it's going to look really different in a hot, dry, arid climate than it is in a more wet case. humid climate. So I think we're just starting to, to get to the tip of the iceberg on kind of what this looks like, across different climates across different regions.

BRAD NEWBOLD 35:10

Right. And so as part of as part of this project, are you looking at different crop cover than or different vegetation and implant cover there? Beneath the, beneath the panels? And, and then at the same time, I think, I think there's something that mentioned about looking at at different, you know, whether whether, you know, different types of crop cover, whether it's grazed, whether it's mowed, whether it's, you know, left just to grow on its own, what are your assumptions or hypotheses within within that level of things.

TAYLOR BACON 35:46

So for the first two years of our study, before we get to the goal of actually building and testing a cattle based system, we're doing all of our measurements and experiments in an existing solar power plant that is currently grazed by sheep. So we're focusing on comparing vegetation management by sheep versus vegetation management by mowing, and then we have a control that's just grazing without any panels. So the vegetation cover and the soil characteristics are pretty comparable across all of our treatment areas. And we're really just looking at the management impacts. So how grazing versus mowing kind of changes what's going on? And hopefully something about how kind of the panels change the the ecosystem and the microclimate?

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:38

Right. So is this something that I was thinking? So we're talking about sheep, a lot smaller than cattle, have given different grazing behaviors as well? And is there is there potential down the line to compare different types of livestock when it comes to grazing patterns and and the effect on on the solar farm there?

TAYLOR BACON 37:01

Yeah, I think there definitely is. And I think this study sets us up well, to do that, because we're establishing baselines with mowing, and with sheep grazing. And for the cattle system, cattle are a lot bigger, there's a lot of concern about damage to panels. So we have the the branch of our project team that's looking at the ecosystem impacts, soil, carbon, stuff like that. And then we have another branch of our team that's actually focused on the design of a cattle compatible PV systems, we have the animal welfare experts and the engineers who are actually trying to design a system. But because nobody's grazing solar panels with cattle yet, because those systems just don't exist. There isn't a way to do a comparison yet. But hopefully, by the end of this study, well, we'll be able to start looking at different species grazing comparisons.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:56

Nice. So how would you how would you consider a or what would you do to say, this is a successful project? What would that what would that look like?

TAYLOR BACON 38:08

So I think, kind of from our, our project standpoint, one of our big goals is having this cattle tracker system actually be operational. So having a 250 kilowatt outdoor test lab functioning solar panels with cattle, grazing, the grazing the air, the vegetation beneath the panels. So that's kind of one of the big goals. But I think, ultimately, anything we learn from all of this data we're collecting will still be incredibly useful. And because it's a relatively short study, we probably won't see huge changes in things like soil, carbon, or other soil on particular changes very slowly. But I think we're establishing a baseline which sets us up to come back and resample and see how things change over longer periods of time. And gives us kind of initial comparison data. And I think, in particular, we're collecting a lot of vegetation samples and seeing how vegetation productivity changes under these different treatments over the course of a growing season. And I think all of that data will be really helpful for informing decisions about how you manage vegetation under solar panels, and what the impacts of grazing compared to mowing, which is a lot of times more standard. Are

BRAD NEWBOLD 39:33

you talked about collecting data, and what are the specific data points that that you're getting? You've mentioned, you know, you want to you want to see how you know, water infiltration into the soil looks, you want to see how I mean potentially down the line about you know, carbon sequestration within the soil, or just the effect of the plants themselves and how they're thriving or not. And, and then also the You know, the the microclimate around around those, how are you measuring? How are you getting each of those data points? How are you measuring it? What are you using to measure it? And what are you seeing or expecting to see?

TAYLOR BACON 40:13

Yeah, so this is another thing that I think is really exciting about this study is we have a lot of different types of data that we're collecting and a lot of different methods we're using. So we just finished our first field season, this spring, spent a couple of weeks out in Georgia at our field field site collecting data. And on the ecosystem side of things, the primary things we were working on is we took a bunch of soil cores, and collected the soil samples at different depths across the different zones. So if you imagine the panels, there's the drip edges, there's directly under the panel, there's between the panels. So in addition to kind of overall effects under the solar array, we're really looking at spatial variability and how the microclimate changes what's going on in the soil and with the vegetation. So we took soil samples across all of those zones, we took vegetation samples, across all the zones. So we can look at how much vegetation is growing, what the functional groups are. So what kind of plants are there, and the our partners at the ranch are continuing to take vegetation samples before and after every vegetation management event. So before a plot gets mowed or grazed, the team there takes a vegetation sample, and then after the event, they'll take another sample. So we can kind of track how these vegetation management practices are influencing biomass productivity. And then we also installed a bunch of microclimate sensors. So we have soil moisture and temperature probes at three different depths across all of our sites. And then we have a bunch of microclimate sensors, so little weather stations, measuring solar radiation, precipitation, air temperature, wind speed, which we expect to have a lot of spatial variability in all of those different variables. And I actually remembered what I was saying earlier, all of this data that we're collecting is also going to feed into a biogeochemical model. So trying to capture, there's a lot of ecosystem models that do that model, plant growth and soil dynamics and carbon fluxes. And the goal is to integrate solar panels with grazing into those ecosystem models. So even if we don't have long term data, we can still use this data to parameterize, the models and hopefully say something really interesting and kind of play out different scenarios with these dynamics. So we have a bunch of different centers and samples that are now back in the lab to be analyzed. And then in addition, we're working with a team from the UK for a company called Pantera. And they installed Eddy Covariance flux towers at each of our treatments. So we'll be measuring Yeah, it's very, very exciting to have that data to. So we can see carbon and water fluxes from our sight and hopefully pair that with all of the vegetation and soil and microclimate measurements and kind of see how the system as a whole is working.

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:28

That's super interesting. That's exciting. Yeah, that's fun to hear. What challenges or roadblocks Have you have you had so far in this project?

TAYLOR BACON 43:38

I think one of the hardest things we ran into was when we were initially designing this research plan and kind of deciding what data we wanted to collect. Deciding what sensors we wanted to use, where we wanted to install them is that there is so much heterogeneity and variation within the solar array, even just within a single block of panels across even just a couple feet apart because of these different zones. And it was challenging to balance okay, what can we feasibly measure and what how much data can we feasibly collect, while still capturing enough of this variability to actually be accurate and to have representative data? And when I first submitted, I was like, Okay, we need 81 TDR hours to measure soil moisture, and RPI was kind of like, why do we need that many, like, that's a lot. So kind of finding that sweet spot and being like, Okay, this is this is going to give us enough data to do the things we're trying to do, while still being feasible to actually implement. We only have so many people to go out and hammer soil cores into the ground and to install all of these sensors so and as a scientist, you always want like the most state you can get and like the highest quality and accepting that like, sometimes you just have to bank on what's feasible and kind of as long as it meets what you need, and kind of step back and be like, Okay, this is going to be enough, even though I would love to have TDR hours, at way more intervals or something like that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 45:20

Yep. I think that's that's been a that's been a forever problem. And I'm sure maybe it'll get, you know, overcome in the future. But But yeah, especially when you're dealing with spatial variability. And that's, that's always one of the big questions that we get here. It's like, okay, yeah, how many sensors do I need? In order to, as I said, depends on your, your project depends on your questions. But yes, we want sensors everywhere, we want to be able to gather data from from every single point. But yeah, but like you said, that's, that's not, that's not feasible right now. And at the same time, too, I mean, with it does make your or can make your models more robust. But again, you know, it's one of those things where, sometimes as you're modeling, there's diminishing returns with, with, you know, the amount of how much you parameter and parameterize, your, your models and how many variables you, you input. And so, yeah, like you said, it's finding that that sweet spot of, of making things work, especially depending on on your budget, as well. So, as we're wrapping things up, can, can you just kind of give us an overview of your thoughts on the I guess the the impact or implications of of your project here, but also potentially the future of this kind of research into agriculture takes and, and, you know, combination of, of renewable energy and and land use?

TAYLOR BACON 46:43

Yeah, I think this field is really exciting, because in my mind, there's not really any question that we're going to have a lot more solar, and that there's going to be a lot of land that has solar installed on it. There's a net zero America study that Princeton did a couple years ago that looked at the footprint of energy, we would need to meet a net zero target by 2050. And in their kind of highest land use scenario, I think it was something like 17 million additional acres of solar power plants. So it's coming. The exact scale, I think, is kind of unknown. But I think there's going to be a lot and we need a lot. But I think this field is exciting, because it's really asking how we can do that, as well as possible, considering not just the solar energy and the like, energy generation carbon side of things, but kind of more systems wide analysis of what this looks like, and how solar installations can be built and designed and managed to really improve ecosystem function rather than detracting. So I think kind of every agricole takes angle, and each different agricultural component looks at this a little differently. But I think as a whole, the field is really exciting for kind of thinking about not just sustainable energy that's sustainable from a energy carbon point of view. But that's from sustained that's sustainable from the land it's on. And our cattle tracker kind of north star is a solution that's good for solar energy generation, good for the land, and good for the animals. And I think zooming out, and having that kind of systems perspective is something that's really great about this Iberville takes field. And I think because so much additional solar energy is kind of a given, there's a lot of benefit from this field, and from all of the data that's starting to come out. And I think each project contribute something a little different. And hopefully, we'll have something useful to say about grazing. And so solar collocation that can help inform how people are doing this, and how solar companies are thinking about their projects and how the people whose land is being leased or thinking about managing their land and working with solar, solar companies rather than kind of losing that agricultural component. So I think there's a lot of a lot of benefits to be had from these systems and from the kind of broader systems level thinking. Awesome.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:24

Any other final thoughts before we wrap things up?

TAYLOR BACON 49:28

I don't think so. This has been great.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:30

Yeah. So our time is up for today. Thank you again, Taylor, for joining us. We do really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. It's been a really fascinating conversation.

TAYLOR BACON 49:42

Thanks again for having me. This is great.

BRAD NEWBOLD 49:46

Stay safe, and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World

Chris Chambers operates as the Environment Support Manager and has been the Soil Moisture Sensor Product Manager for many years at METER Group. He specializes in ecology and plant physiology and has 15 years of experience helping researchers measure the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum.

Leo Rivera operates as a research scientist and Director of Scientific Outreach at METER Group. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degree in soil science at Texas A&M University where his research focused on the impacts of land use and landscape on soil hydraulic properties. He also helped develop an infiltration system for measuring hydraulic conductivity used by the NRCS in Texas. Currently, Leo leads METER’s collaborative research efforts, and focuses on application development in hydrology instrumentation, including the SATURO infiltrometer and the HYPROP. He also works in R&D to explore new instrumentation for water and nutrient movement in the soil.

Links to learn more about Leo Rivera

Author page on Environmental Biophysics Blog

Leo Rivera on LinkedIn

Leo Rivera on ResearchGate

Links to learn more about Chris Chambers

Chris Chambers on LinkedIn

Chris Chambers biography on METER

Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 0:08

So if you have matric potential soil suction, and water content, do you even need to know anything about the soil type anymore?

LEO RIVERA 0:17

You know, when it comes to understanding the hydraulic properties of soil? No, those are the things that we need to get to, to know. Now there are other physical properties that we probably need to understand soil type when it comes to like plasticity index and things like that. But for most people, most applications if you know the water content and water potential, and you understand that relationship, that tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 0:43

Any comments on that can go straight to Leo Rivera.

LEO RIVERA 0:46

Or Brad just one of us!

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:51

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today's guests are research scientists Leo Rivera and Chris Chambers, both of whom are water content and water potential sensor and application experts here at meter group. Chris chambers operates as the environment Support Manager and has been the soil moisture sensor Product Manager for many years at METER Group. He specializes in ecology and plant physiology, and has 15 years of experience helping researchers measure the soil plant atmosphere continuum. Leo Rivera operates as a research scientist and director of scientific outreach at METER Group. He earned his undergraduate and master's degree in soil science at Texas a&m University. And there his research focused on the impacts of land use and landscape on soil hydraulic properties. He also helped develop an infiltration system for measuring hydraulic conductivity used by the NRCS and Texas. Currently, Leo leads METER's collaborative research efforts and focuses on application development in hydrology instrumentation, including the SATURO Infiltrometer and the HYPROPROP. He also works in r&d to explore new instrumentation for water and nutrient movement in the soil. So Leo and Chris, thank you so much for being here.

LEO RIVERA 2:13

Thanks, Brad.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 2:14

Thanks, Brad. Happy to be here.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:17

All right. So we probably need to start out by talking about the differences between soil water content and soil water potential. Can, can you just give us a brief definition of both these parameters? What is soil water content? And what is soil water potential?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 2:34

Right. And so what we're talking about is ways to describe the state of water in the soil.

LEO RIVERA 2:40

Yep.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 2:41

And they are both extremely valuable and give you complimentary information. And so the soil water content is the amount of water there, it's how much water is in any given volume of soil. And the water potential is the energy state. So when we talk about these things, people will generally say soil moisture, and they generally mean water content.

LEO RIVERA 3:07

Yep.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 3:07

We're trying to get a little broader view of soil moisture out there. And it really includes both of these parameters.

LEO RIVERA 3:15

Yeah, yeah. And oftentimes, I mean, when people look at water content or water potential, they're typically looking at it in terms of volumetric water content, how much water is there per volume of soil, but geotechnical engineers often often like to look at in terms of gravimetric water content. So it often depends on the field that you're coming from and how you want to look at it. geotechnical engineers also like to call soil water potential soil suction, and they look at it in terms of a positive value. So it's the inverse of water potential, which this takes some time. It takes a little bit to wrap your mind around that sometimes. But depends on the field you're coming from and what you're really trying to understand and how you're using that information.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 3:52

Yeah, but in the end, it's the mass and the energy state.

LEO RIVERA 3:56

Yep.

BRAD NEWBOLD 3:57

All right. So that being said, what types of situations would you only need soil water content? And in the same, you know, the same vein? What type of situations would you only need soil water potential?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 4:10

Can we play our favorite game for a bit?

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:13

Sure!

CHRIS CHAMBERS 4:13

Okay, water content or water potential? Okay, we've done this a couple of times, so you might have seen it before. Bear with us a little bit, okay! Um, so let's start with maybe maybe not as easy as you might think. A setpoint for irrigation control?

LEO RIVERA 4:30

Ooh, good question. So, ideally, we're going to control irrigation to hit a target water potential. But we need the water content to know how much water we need to add to hit those target points.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 4:45

See, we threw the curve in too early. Yeah, we'll come back to that. Yeah. Let's do a new one. How much? How much tension is going to be on the water column of a plant?

LEO RIVERA 4:59

Water potential.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 5:00

Water potential all the way. Let's say how, what if what you want to measure if you want to measure the amount? See, I'm giving, I'm giving it away here. It's hard. It's hard to phrase these without giving it away in the question. The amount of water loss.

LEO RIVERA 5:17

The amount of... I mean, water content is gonna give us the information there. Right, right. Let me throw one your way. If there's a risk of slope failure?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 5:27

Woohoo. So once again, we're back to needing both of those, right?

LEO RIVERA 5:34

Yeah, I think, first of all failure water, the amount of water there is helpful, but the biggest factor is the water potential or the soil suction, as I refer to it, because that kind of gives us that intrinsic strength component.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 5:50

But sometimes the positive pressure is a factor there too, right?

LEO RIVERA 5:52

For sure. How's it? Yeah, yeah. So we're really we're ideally looking at both the negative and positive pore pressures.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 5:59

Great. How about freezing potential in, like, say in like a wheat hardiness study?

LEO RIVERA 6:10

Ooo oh a curveball in there. Yeah. That's a good question. Freezing potential. I mean, I think water potential is probably going to govern that more. Right. But also, we could use I mean, if it actually frozen, we can use temperature to infer the water potential.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 6:25

Yeah and that will kind of give you the same information. Right? When you when you hit the freezing point, they're both going to just look like really dry soils.

LEO RIVERA 6:32

Yeah. Yeah. And then from there, you can use temperature to kind of infer guess what, what's happening there.?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 6:38

So as long as we play this game, you think we'd be better at it by now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 6:43

All right, so you have given us a couple of instances here examples of when a water content and water potential work well together. So are there any other or not are there? But can you give us some other examples or situations when it's appropriate to measure both of those parameters at the same time,

CHRIS CHAMBERS 7:01

so people are really used to using water content? Because it it's easy to understand, right? Basically, at the end of the day, you get a percent. And that's really easy for people to wrap their head around. Yeah, you're looking at a volume of soil, that's 25%. water content, volumetric water content, then right about the fraction of quarter of that soil is made up of water. Unfortunately, it's a lot harder to interpret than many people realize. Because 25% water content in a sand is more water than any plant needs. And in a clay, it's probably well beyond the permanent wilting point. So you can't really just use water content. In some situations, you either need the matric potential as well. Or you need to know some more information like the soil type.

LEO RIVERA 7:55

Yeah. And I think I'd even argue that in most situations where people are just using water content, they're doing it based on historical knowledge of what that means for that soil. And really, it's because they've spent enough time knowing what that means in terms of water potential without knowing that they're actually trying to understand that they're like, my plants are happy, my plants are sad. These are my set points for water content.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 8:19

Especially in seasonal areas, we've got a couple of years of data, you know, where it peaks out in the wet season, you know, where it flattens out where, where the plants draw as much as they can in the dry season, if you live in a climate like that. So that's really how the context is giving to a lot of a lot of water content studies.

LEO RIVERA 8:39

Yeah, yeah. And what I mean, one other, you're looking for a specific application, anytime you're trying to understand hydrology, and water movement, in soil and where it's going, you need both parameters, because the governing factor of which way the water is going to move is the water potential. And the amount of water that we're moving is going to be based on the water content. And anytime we're doing a hydrology study if like you're really trying to understand, you know, the Vados zone and and how water moves through the soil, you need to understand both these parameters,

CHRIS CHAMBERS 9:14

The soil storage for one, and then the direction that it's going to go which is the water water potential, and that you don't need to know as much so let me ask you this, maybe this question might ruffle some feathers, but I'm going to put you on the spot. So if you have matric potential of soil suction and water content, do you even need to know anything about soil type anymore?

LEO RIVERA 9:41

You know, when it comes to understanding the hydraulic properties of soil, no, those are the things that we need to know. Now there are other physical properties that we probably need to understand soil type when it comes to like plasticity index and things like that. But for most people, most applications if You know the water content and water potential and you understand that relationship? It tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 10:07

Any comments on that can go straight to Leo Rivera.

LEO RIVERA 10:12

Or Brad just one of us

CHRIS CHAMBERS 10:15

know Yeah, okay, let's, let's take that a step further. So now we have and really this is a lot more of an issue because water potential matric potential used to be a lot harder to measure, right? I mean, how long did it How long did we spend developing the terrorists? 21?

LEO RIVERA 10:34

You mean? How long are we still spending?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 10:35

How long? When is the tariffs 21 going to be fully cooked? Yeah. But now we're pushing the measurements down getting some reliable readings at the permanent wilting point and below. So it's that readings a lot more accessible. Do people really know what to do with those together? Now we're kind of getting into, we can get water content and water potential pretty, pretty reasonably and get kind of make accurate soil water retention curves in the in the ground? Yeah. So what? How do people use that? What do we do with this extra with this extra power?

LEO RIVERA 11:17

Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. I mean, you've talked about the amount of time we spent developing these centers, which has been challenging. And we're still continuing to push that. In order to really, I mean, we are now at a point where I think we can really utilize these tools in the field, to characterize the soil hydraulic properties in a way that we haven't been able to do before, and where we've relied on laboratory methods to do that. So I think there is a lot more power in our capabilities now. Now, I will say that I think we need to keep pushing the boundaries in terms of what we can do with the sensor. Right. But for most, a lot of applications, these sensors are super powerful now. Yeah. I mean, the with what we've worked on what the solid matrix sensors like the TEROS 21, the gen two version. I mean, its capabilities are so much further than they were 20 years ago.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 12:14

Yeah, exactly.

LEO RIVERA 12:15

Yeah.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 12:16

Okay, let's take a step back, because I just kind of threw a new term in there, and we didn't stop. Soil water retention curves. It's the relationship between the water content and soil suction, you know, hit the matric potential. And it's my experience with with making that with collecting data, and then fitting the curve to make that relationship is it's a pretty involved process. And for a long time, it's been, you know, kind of a specialized area of science. But now it's more and more available. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about? Okay, what do we do with the soil water retention curve? How, why is it so important? And yeah, well, how is it traditionally done?

LEO RIVERA 13:06

Yeah. Well, you know, we often refer to the soil water retention curve being the finger fingerprint of the soil, right. And because it is unique, every soil has its own retention curve, because there's different property and intrinsic properties that shape how that retention curve looks and what that means. Historically, there's been a lot of different ways that we've had to make these measurements and the you can't use one device, one instrument one tool to make the full retention curve. So typically, you know, in the past, we've used tools like pressure plates, and filter paper method, which not a big fan of and if I hear you're using filter paper method, I will be sad. No, sorry, to all my engineering friends out there. And then we have tools like the dewpoint techniques like with the WP4C that have really pushed our capabilities of understanding the dry end capture the dry end of the of the curve, but we still needed to make improvements. There's tools like hang water columns, which are great. And one of our colleagues here in METER group absolutely loves his hanging water column. And, and they are really powerful for doing certain things. But then we have tools like the HYPROP now, that have really simplified our ability to characterize the wet end of the soil moisture release curve. And now something that a measurement that historically has taken several months to complete, which is why it's probably been so specialized, because it takes so much time and it's not easy to do, can be done in in a week typically right to make characterize the full curve. And we aren't now have new tools, like the VSA that can help us even further understand what's happening on the dry end of the moist, really secure fish tells us a ton of information.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 14:56

Okay, and so now we've got all the specialized equipment general, generally, generally, the data and using the data and making that thing has been confined to its own special branch of, of science. But now that, like right now we have 1,000's and 1,000's of sensors in the field together collecting data that is really parallel to that process. How? How does the how does the field observations that are being collected right now? How would they compare to the lab? Are we sacrificing some data quality on those is the analysis a little bit trickier, because, you know, you have to have a range of basically water states of the soil, right? Saturated to some, some, some spread of data points to capture the variability right to make this curve. And so, you know, you might be waiting some months, if you're in the wet season, you might not really get much of the curve. So, how do you put that together in the front field data?

LEO RIVERA 16:04

Yeah, it takes time. That's, I mean, that's really the the, the, the final answer is that it just to get a proper retention curve in the field, you need a good season, or a couple seasons of data, sometimes you have to give a whole range

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:21

Or part of the range who so do you need to get down to permanent wilting point, do you think?

LEO RIVERA 16:27

I mean, it depends on what you want to know?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 16:29

Mmm good point.

LEO RIVERA 16:30

Do you care? I mean, do we care about permanent wilting point, which if you're worried about, you know, plant stress and that type of things? Yeah, I think it's good to get down there. And, which that's pretty doable in most cases unless you're irrigating heavily, or not heavily, I mean, trying to irrigate and keep things within that range, you might never hit that. So it depends on how you have your sensors. Right? And what the field practices. Yeah.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 17:01

So there's still going to be times when the lab lab analysis is absolutely necessary, because then you control the environment. You can you can make the curve as as broad or as small as, as you like, right.

LEO RIVERA 17:14

Yeah. Now, I mean, you can do quite a bit more within the lab and do it faster, which is the power but you know, there's more power and also an understanding what's happening in the field. Right. So

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:31

So I don't know if we've, if we've hit this one, but along with moisture release scores, how does how long does it take to make a moisture release curve in the field? With NCT sensors?

LEO RIVERA 17:41

Yeah, I kind of touched on a little bit. But really, ideally, you're going to need six months to nine months worth of data in most cases. Because if you're really trying to get a proper retention curve in the field, you need a good wetting and drying period. And, and, for example, we have some sensors installed on the soccer field right now. And our sorry, we have a soccer field that we outside of our building. Just to explain that we're we're we have an irrigation project in place where we're trying to control based on evapotranspiration and the water content, water, potential data, and really fine tune our irrigation practices. But you know, it's going to I won't have a full insitu retention curve from those until probably November. And I installed the sensors a couple weeks ago, actually a week ago now. So it just, it takes time, it also depends on your climatic conditions, which you're going to hit. But but it also is, you know, something that you need to understand is that water, so much release curves, we talk about letting versus drying curves, but there's really the scanning function that happens when you're going back and forth. That's why when, you know, we oftentimes see people try to use one portion of the soil moisture release curve to try to understand what's happening in that completely in the soil. And there's risks when you do that, because wetting and drying behaviors are different. And then when you're in that scanning curve, it can be different and that's why when you have that actual physical measurement of water potential in the soil, you know exactly what's happening. And then we can fully understand those properties and how that and how that behaves. And yeah, anyways.

BRAD NEWBOLD 19:21

You have talked about some of the practical applications for soil moisture release curves. Are there any, any others that that you feel like our audience would would really need to know or understand about how soil moisture release curves would be able to impact or affect or help their their research and their studies?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 19:42

And not just research for this? Because there's a lot of, one, and this is where we're kind of on the cusp of, you know, making these data, making these data presentable and, and presenting it in a way where people can absorb the information from the soil water retention curve and decisions on it. And there's there's a lot of really interesting possibilities coming up. A few years ago, how long was it get when we had the big floods?

LEO RIVERA 20:14

Oh, yeah. It was right around the Palouse here that was probably four years ago now?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 20:18

Gosh, doesn't seem that long ago. But as a center company, you can imagine what like we install stuff all over the place. And just to see, well, how's this gonna react here and there. So we, when we had a torrent of rain, just over a short span of time, I can't remember it was over a couple of days. Yeah. And a week for sure. And, you know, but it wasn't, it wasn't an insane amount of rain, we've gotten that much precipitation before without flooding. And in this particular case, all of downtown Pullman flooded, there was flooding all across this region, Moscow and, and we went back and looked and looked at some of our sensor data across the region. And what was interesting is that, we could see that in this case, we'd had a freeze, a lot of the pore spaces had filled up. And the different part about this was that there was no place for the water to infiltrate into the ground. And our if we didn't have both tension to realize that, hey, we're at saturation, and the water content for how much water was in the pore spaces, you know, that, that there was a large volume of water there. We also had some stream depth type sensors around and looking back, it was easy to see that, oh, of course, this is going to flood if we get this much more precipitation. Yeah. And so that's an area where not just soil water retention curve, but the soil water retention curve, plus some stream depth and some precipitation. And we can start making really good models without having to do extensive soil, you know, soil type, yeah, kind of classifications to be able to predict this kind of event. But getting that information in a consumable form is kind of a trick at this stage.

LEO RIVERA 22:17

Yeah. Yeah. It was funny when this was all happening. When the floods were starting to occur. We were all nerding out looking at everybody. Yeah, and, but what's really, I mean, when you go back and look at it, if you look at the storage that was occurring in the soil, and how you could actually see the profile filling. And we saw that in both water content and water potential data where we were approaching saturation at deeper depths, and it was moving its way up to the surface. That was like, oh, yeah, there's not much storage, capacity storage capacity left in the soil. And now we have a much greater risk of flood and then we got more rain, and we had flooding, right. And so that's, you know, I think we're seeing more of this, we're seeing more adoption of soil moisture sensors and things like that, and water and water potential to in these big weather networks now, because they're starting to see that this is an important parameter for understanding things like this and also understanding other weather dynamics. And so it's, it's I'm really excited to see the future where that goes and how they start utilizing that information. And when we start getting these big networks of water, water content and water potential out there, how it's going to unlock so much.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 23:29

It's with the irrigation potential to precisely manage irrigation. You know, it's the, it's really kind of the simplest way to set your irrigation set points based off of matric potential, right. But then with other factors, like the VPD, you've got your refill points with matric potential, and then you have how much water is stored in the soil with water content? Yeah, so you can calculate with a few estimates of ET, how long it's going to be before you hit your refill point and how much water you'll need to add precisely. So this, the soil water retention curves can be extremely valuable in that type of an that type of application as well.

LEO RIVERA 24:11

Yeah. And Brad to add one more to that, you know, list of areas that retention curves are starting to bring a lot more power. We're seeing on the geotechnical engineering side of things and what we've learned from the the drying characteristics of the soil moisture release curve, that not only can we use it to understand, you know, plant stress and things like that and potential for flooding, but also soil mechanical properties and in properties about the clay, the type of clay that's in the soil, the can ion exchange capacity, the specific surface area like there's all these properties that all that information is actually in the retention curve. and combining that with a few other things is really going to unlock a lot of things in terms of simplifying the way we characterize soils for engineering purposes as well. And there's researchers like Ningaloo, Bill Lycos, and others that are doing some really awesome work in this area. And, and putting a lot of papers out and working on new methodology to simplify these. These tests that sometimes also, again, take time, take weeks take months to collect data on and, and being able to do all of that with one curve that takes less than 24 hours to to get oh its going to be so cool.

BRAD NEWBOLD 25:37

All right, anything else you want to add about soil moisture release curves that we feel we didn't touch on?

LEO RIVERA 25:43

No, go out and measure so much release curves, they're fun.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 25:46

Or they Yeah, or just think about the way that the the water stayed in your soil is develops over time, right? And you're gonna have inputs and outputs. But these two variables are just kind of bring back what we've been talking about these two variables are the, the state of your water. And so if you can pay so much attention to the fluxes, the precipitation, the evapotranspiration, then the the model of how the water behaves in your soil is going to be more complete.

LEO RIVERA 26:28

Yeah. And I'll just add that, you know, historically, I understand why people have steered away from making some of these measurements, especially water potential, because it involves tools that took a lot of maintenance so they are not easy to use, and um

CHRIS CHAMBERS 26:43

And -20 kPa is a little bit trickier to understand than 20%.

LEO RIVERA 26:48

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And water potential is still one of the hardest things to teach in soil science. Like, it's the thing that takes the longest time for people to comprehend. But once they do, they see like, oh, wow, this is such a powerful parameter. And now we're working, you know, tools, the tools are getting easier to use, they're getting better, they're getting more accurate, more reliable. And, and so hopefully, it's going to make it easier to adopt. And as we work on making them easier to install, the hope is that these are going to become more powerful tools for your more general users of this information. And so that's, you know, we're gonna keep working on that and trying to make the tools better. But it's really fun to see what people are doing with it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 27:30

With everything that you guys have been saying about what a potential, and we feel and believe and understand it to be so critical. Why does it seem like we're just now starting to talk about it so much versus, you know, compared to water content? Which is, you know, been around forever?

LEO RIVERA 27:47

It's a good question. I think some of it has to do with the tools, like just how challenging it has been to measure them. But I also think, you know, if we think about, let's just use the food industry as an example. And water activity, which is the same thing is, it's the same with water potential, a different way of looking at it, in food. And what they've learned is that water activity tells us so much more about what actually is going to happen with that food product is the risk for mold risk for bacteria, how it affects the texture and taste of the food. And, you know, it took them a long time to move away from water content measurements of food to water activity. And sometimes it's just, it takes a long time to change mindsets. And some of it is that again, water potential has been so hard to understand. Like, of course, they're gonna be scared of it.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 28:38

Let me throw this out there. Let me challenge you with this though. Because is it just the accessibility of the information? Because sometimes you can if you've got matric potential, and this was this came up. Last year, I was just Well, I wanted to learn about some set points for growing tomatoes. You get into you dig into the literature, and it's like, oh, you know, you can you want it at -20 kPa for this part of this development cycle and -40 kPa for this part of its development cycle. There's a lot of information like that that's already been done research is already available. Is it just not getting to the right places? And if not, how? How do we how do we get that message out further?

LEO RIVERA 29:25

That's a good question. If you were to ask somebody, just let's say somebody calls you up on the phone. Yep. And you ask them, Hey, do you know what your target market potential ranges are for your tomatoes? Oh, but they know the answer right now.

CHRIS CHAMBERS 29:36

I guess not. But you know, that information is there and is done.

LEO RIVERA 29:42

Yeah, it's there. But how accessible is it and how, you know, this is in research. This is the challenge is writing research and getting the information in front of general users, which is oftentimes a role like extension groups and things like that. And I think that's where we've maybe missed The mark a little bit is, you know, yeah there is a ton of... We see this in other industries, too, where people are trying to repeat work that was done in another industry 30 years ago. Yep. But that information, either is not easy to find, or they just didn't take the time to find it, of course, right. But yeah, it's just I, you know, I think it's up to us as we educate, not just I mean, not just ourselves, but other folks that are teaching these things that there is this information out there and, and how you have to get it out there. Now, you'll find those niche people who like dig through the dig through Google and find this information. But how many people actually do that?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 30:40

I don't know!

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:42

All right. And so in this, in this instance, then if we have people if it's an issue with, with getting that information information out there, or, you know, adoption of of this of this information, how would you then explain water potential to, you know, colleague or somebody who has already used water content? And then doesn't see the need to use anything beyond that?

LEO RIVERA 31:05

Yeah, that's a good question. And there's, the first thing that comes to mind for me, is, is great if you know what your water content means, at that spot in the field? Can you apply it to another area if you move to another field? Or the thing is, we know that these properties are the we're seeing the term a lot now, dynamic soil properties change around so as practices change on the land. As land use changes, or as we start, yeah, improving our growing practices, whatever, like starting move towards no tillage, or other things, these dynamic soil properties, which that moisture release curve is a dynamic soil property change. So what you thought the water content meant, a while back, doesn't mean the same thing as these properties change. And so like, if you really want to understand what's going on, you need to understand these values. And when we see this all the time with people who think oh, yeah, I'm doing great, my my turfs looking good, my potatoes are looking good. And then when you actually look at what they're measuring in terms of water potential or water content, they're either way over irrigating. So they're wasting water, risking more chances for disease, or in like turf, turf. Areas where these invasive species can compete better if it's too wet. This is a lot of things where if you actually were measuring and knew what was going on, you could still improve your practices, even though you think you know it so well.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:35

As we come to the close of this episode, is there anything else that you feel like we need to cover hit when it comes to water potential water contents, or soil moisture release curves? Any final thoughts?

CHRIS CHAMBERS 32:51

I think at this stage, it's a game of it's a game of communication. Right? We we we actually know a lot about how to build these and how to collect the data. And we're getting better at making the data available. It's it's the putting the information in the contact where people can, can make decisions based off of based off of the information or pull it all together in one place and be able to be able to add the context for either decision making or understanding the other variables in the process. So that's, that's where it that's where it falls for me. And I hope we've got plans to work on that over the over the future and help to make that easier for people.

LEO RIVERA 33:42

Yeah, I think that about sums it up. I mean, we need to make this information, easier to understand easier to digest and, and continue to make these tools easier to use.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:52

All right, well, our time is up for today. Thank you again, you and Chris, for taking time to share your insights with us and everybody in the audience here. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World!

Contact us at metergroup.com or on twitter @meter_env

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Dr. John Norman, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was Professor of Soil Science and also Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He is a Fellow in the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Norman has received the American Meteorology Society award for Outstanding Biometeorologist, was the appointed Rothermel Bascom Professor of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin, and was awarded the University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Spitze Land Grant Award for Faculty Excellence. He advises graduate students and postdocs and has hundreds of refereed publications to his name. In 2008 the American Meteorological Society and the American Society of Agronomy sponsored symposia in his honor, and in 2016 the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Science.

Dr. Gaylon Campbell has been a research scientist and engineer at METER for over 20 years following nearly 30 years on faculty at Washington State University. His first experience with environmental measurement came in the lab of Sterling Taylor at Utah State University making water potential measurements to understand plant water status. Dr. Campbell is one of the world’s foremost authorities on physical measurements in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. His book written with Dr. John Norman on environmental biophysics provides a critical foundation for anyone interested in understanding the physics of the natural world. He’s written three books, over 100 refereed journal articles, various book chapters, and has several patents.

Links to learn more about Dr. John Norman

Dr. John Norman's faculty page at UW Madison

Dr. John Norman on ResearchGate

Drs. John Norman and Gaylon Campbell's book

Links to learn more about Dr. Gaylon Campbell

Dr. Gaylon Campbell on ResearchGate

Dr. Gaylon Campbell's interview on his book with Dr. John Norman

Dr. Gaylon Campbell on Academia

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Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

JOHN NORMAN 0:08

Nobody in these disciplines tends to study the interface. And the interface is everything. All the things that happened go through that interface. So if we're going to try to understand our environment, we need not to recognize this interface yet. Trying to work with other people to learn more about the boundary, bounding disciplines to what we want to do. You constantly running into this limitation that their understanding of the medium stops at the edge of their discipline. And so, I've always found that very challenging to cross those disciplinary boundaries.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:01

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today's guests are doctors John Norman and Galen Campbell. DR. John Norman, currently professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Madison was Professor of soil science and also atmospheric and oceanic science. He is a fellow in the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Norman has received the American meteorology Society Award for Outstanding bio meteorologist was appointed Rothermel Bascom, Professor of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin and was awarded the University of Wisconsin College of Agricultural and Life Sciences spritzy land grant award for Faculty Excellence. He advises graduate students and postdocs and has hundreds of refereed publications to his name. In 2008, the American Meteorological Society and the American Society of Agronomy sponsored symposia in his honor, and in 2016, the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada awarded him an honorary doctorate of science. Dr. Gaylon Campbell has been a research scientist and engineer at meter for over 20 years following nearly 30 years on faculty at Washington State University. His first experience with environmental measurement came in the lab of sterling Taylor at Utah State University, making water potential measurements to understand plant water status. Dr. Campbell is one of the world's foremost authorities on physical measurements in the soil plant atmosphere continuum. His book written with Dr. John Norman, which we will discuss later on, on environmental biophysics provides a critical foundation for anyone interested in understanding the physics of the natural world. He's written three books over 100 refereed journal articles, various book chapters and has several patents. And today, both John and Galen are here to talk about their widely used co authored book, An Introduction to Environmental biophysics on its 25 year anniversary. And we wanted to celebrate a few of their many contributions to the field of environmental science. So thank you, John, and Gaylon, so much for being here. First off, we do want to cover a little bit of your backgrounds. Can you tell us a little bit of how you became involved in the sciences in general, and in environmental and climate studies, specifically, and, John, we'll start with you first.

JOHN NORMAN 3:27

That's a long story. But I guess I'll try to make it short. But I was a really young child, I like to take things apart. So I would always find something in the garbage or something my family didn't want anymore. And I take it apart to see how it worked. So I've always been curious about how things work. When I was in the sixth grade, I had a really good man, teacher, my first man teacher in elementary school, he did a nice job with science. And I was fascinated by it. And I would bring things home and my older sister, who was six years older than me, so here I am, 12. And she's 18. And, you know, siblings that are that far apart at that age, don't have much to do with each other. She happened to see one of these science things that was doing and encouraged me in a really strong way. And I think from that point on, I thought about science as something to do when I really had never thought about that before. And then a spectacular eighth grade math teacher who became my biology teacher, and my chemistry teacher, really took me under his wing and science really became my pursuit through his tutelage. And I started in mechanical engineering because I knew identical things. Well, that didn't last long because I found out what engineers did and I knew I didn't want to do that. because I wanted to spend time outside, I grew up in the woods, north woods in Minnesota. And I wanted to be outside to do my science. Through a number of serendipitous events, I, I ended up at the University of Minnesota, got my master's degree there and then a PhD in Madison and went off to Scotland for the first postdoc, then to Penn State and Nebraska and finally finished up my career in Wisconsin.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:31

And Gaylon, for you. I know we've heard your story, I think on a previous episode, could you give us a recap of how you came to be in environmental science?

GAYLON CAMPBELL 5:42

You know, I grew up on a farm in southern Idaho. Like John, I had some really good teachers, and in our high school, math and physics and chemistry teachers were really outstanding. When it was time to go to college, I actually started in engineering to, like John decided that wasn't the right place. So I switched to physics then the physics curriculum that there was time to explore and experiment, some and so since I had grown up on a farm, I wanted to take a class in soils. And so I took the soils class, and that was taught by Sterling Taylor, one of the really outstanding soil physicists at the time, and he invited me to work in his laboratory. Really, he was the one who influenced me strongly in that direction. Finally, I got a bachelor's in physics, Utah State, got a master's with Sterling and came to Washington State University for a PhD. After time in the army, this is where I spent my career. I retired from the university almost 25 years ago and went to work for METER.

BRAD NEWBOLD 7:01

And so how did the two of you become introduced? How did you begin this collaboration that has spanned over 25 years?

JOHN NORMAN 7:10

That's one of the real gifts in my career is that invitation is very powerful effect, because I learned so much from from Gaylon and I heard so much about him from my advisor, particularly champ Tanner, an awful lot of Gaylon's work, I used his earlier version, the first edition of environmental biophysics, love that book. And I used I taught out of it, the invitation was a real joy to me. Highlight in my career.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 7:48

I think I knew John from things that he published even in those early years of his career, they were just mind blowing to me. And what a brave young man Uh, yes. I'm glad I could teach him something because he stopped me an awful lot. We collaborated on some modeling projects and published a number of papers together. And I would say that of all of the people that have influenced me in my career that John is one of the most important.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:20

So how did you decide that creating this collaboration and working on this book together was something that could be meaningful that you could do together?

GAYLON CAMPBELL 8:28

As John said, there was a first edition of the book, the book came out of the course that I taught there at Washington State University. And when it was written, I think the approach I took was the one that was in vogue or in place, but by the late 80s, early 90s, why it was clear that things had taken a bit different direction, and there was a lot that needed to be updated in the book, the approach to calculating conductances the use of mole fluxes rather than mass fluxes or things like that, number of things had to be done. And a lot of the progress in a lot of those areas had come because of John's work and publications and research, particularly in plant canopies in modeling all of the above ground things and so it just seemed like a no brainer to see if John would be willing to join me in bringing a lot of those things up to date

JOHN NORMAN 9:32

in the 80s again, and helped me in a really sticky problem, probably one of the most difficult problems I confronted in for the fact that I worked on it for nine months, trying to solve it myself and I couldn't I knew a lot about the canopy and the atmosphere part of this problem, but I knew less about the soil But I knew nothing about how to connect the two together. Because the soil surface is a tough place to deal with. It's a boundary disciplinary wise in our pursuits. And it's also a boundary between a fluid and a solid or a porous solid. I just could not get the differential equations for the canopy in the atmosphere aside, to merge with the soil side. I tried everything I could do. And I finally I contacted Gaylon. And then Gaylon gave me a solution for this problem to solve it. I mean, it wasn't trivial to do it. It took reprogramming and things, some effort. And then finally, it took a few weeks to do. But after nine months of struggling, it was it was a godsend to me. And it's it's a very powerful idea for how to link things that are very different than science in general. Boy that sealed my respect for Gaylon. And when the invitation came, I jumped at it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:14

Where did this field originate from? And how would you break it down? For those who might just be hearing about it for the first time? How does it apply to not only the sciences, but also their daily lives.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 11:26

The course that I taught here at WSU is still taught now and it's taught by my son, Colin who's employed by METER, but as an adjunct appointment at the university and teaches that course each year that he let me give the first lecture this year. In that lecture, I said that environmental biophysics deals with heat and mass exchange between organisms and their environment, but I'm not sure that description does anything to help anybody that doesn't already know what environmental biophysics is. If you think about us as living organisms, our job is to capture resources from the environment. That's how we stay alive. That's how we thrive is by capturing resources and environmental biophysics, his mathematical description or physical description of how that resource capture occurs, quantifying how quickly or how much resource we can capture.

BRAD NEWBOLD 12:27

Anything to add to that, John?

JOHN NORMAN 12:30

The irony of this field of study though, is that in science, we really don't deal well with living systems. We deal principally with a nonliving physical constraints, the living system, the things that limit us environmentally, but the essence of what we are and how we function and our creativity and our resourcefulness and our versatility and adaptability, self organized nature of life itself, which is really non quantifiable for us. That that part, science kind of leaves uncertain, and I think doesn't really deal with it. I think in environmental biophysics, the thing that attracted me to the field was this connection between human essence and the physical world around us. It's a mystery to me and studying it has been really fun for 50 years.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 13:37

The man that I worked with at Utah State University, Sterling Taylor was in a field called soil physics. The one that John worked at at Wisconsin, worked with Wisconsin was champ Tanner, they were two of the giants in that field of soil physics, but they saw that as a broader thing than soils that also involve the above ground environment. Both of them work pretty hard to understand both the above ground environment of plants and the below ground environment, plants and so it. It's always seemed kind of funny to me that environmental biophysics would come out of soil physics, but it was because of the vision and ability of people like Champ and Stirling that it did

BRAD NEWBOLD 14:30

with environmental biophysics being such a complex field and it integrates studies from many other disciplines, from mechanical and electrical engineering to plant physiology. We're dealing with atmospheric sciences and others. How challenging was that? Then to put all of this together all in one place and be able to make sense of it all.

JOHN NORMAN 14:52

That pursuit of wholeness trying to deal with the whole environment that we humans have To confront and face one way or another, directly or indirectly, our physical survival depends entirely on how we relate to this world around us. I don't see the boundaries between these different disciplines. In terms of the work in terms of what we're doing. The disciplinary boundaries do exist. And they're very sharp, and they're very strong. One that's really obvious for us for both Galen and I, because of working with vegetation and the atmosphere on one side of it. And working with the depth of the soil on the other side, is this soil interface. That soil interface is not only physical phenomena, it's not only a physical interface that really exists. But it's also a disciplinary interface. So you have disciplines like geology, soil physics, chemistry, soil biology, hydrogeology, beneath that surface, dealing with that medium as a whole. But you also have atmospheric science, you have crop science, you have plant physiology, you have a host of these disciplines, civil engineering hydrology, that are on the upper half, and the disciplines on each side, put their boundary conditions at the surface. So really, nobody in these disciplines tends to study the interface, the interface is everything. All the things that happen go through that interface. So if we're going to try to understand our environment, we need not to recognize this interface yet. Trying to work with other people to learn more about the bounding disciplines to what we want to do. You constantly running into this limitation that their understanding of the medium stops at the edge of their discipline, I've always found it very challenging to cross those disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, it's it's a big challenge. And it's fun to do. Because it's a wild and wooly territory, the biggest problems I encountered in my whole career, were the formal issues like grant proposals with grant proposals, you submit a integrated project like that, the grant monitors don't know who to send it to. So they send it to a lot of specialists in different disciplines. And they all come back and say, well, this isn't particularly novel in my discipline. I mean, which it isn't. In all fairness, it isn't but putting them all together is really novel issue. But who do you send the proposal to do that? And so proposal rejections, you know, are just something that I had to get used to, which is frustration, but the on the other end on the publication end the reviewers for the journals would do the same thing. And then you would have to deal with the editors and hope that the editor was more forgiving for crossing these boundaries, then the disciplinary specialists were who were reviewing it. And I have lots of discussions with journal editors. And some of them would bend their rules, and some of them wouldn't. So you had to deal with that rejection, too. So it was mostly personal, I suppose. The problems that I ran into,

GAYLON CAMPBELL 18:53

I suppose I ran into some of that too. But think about some of the pioneers in the area like Sterling and like Champ Tanner, and other one of the giants was John Monti. He published a book called Environmental physics. Little before I published my first addition. And I was already teaching that class and struggling to find a way to teach something that covered the whole area. And a student one day brought that book in and showed it to me. And I said, Oh, hey, can I borrow this? He said, Well, you can have it overnight. And, I took it home. And I read it all night. That's the only science book I have ever been able to read through the night and finally finished it by morning. He did such a beautiful job in that book of showing how to do exactly what you're talking about here of bringing those things together.

JOHN NORMAN 19:53

I think that the conciseness of the book is Gaylon gift I've never been noted for that talent, particularly as people have made clear as so many of my publications are opaque to him. But I learned a lot from reading those chapters that were in the original book and trying to absorb the conciseness. Trying to absorb how Gaylon did that, and then try to imitate it, you'll probably notice that there's a little less conciseness, in the later chapters make it a little bit more than that, at least that's what I'm told by the students. So I don't think I entirely succeeded. But I did try. I think that's something that's very hard to learn.

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:48

The story goes that the first copies of your book were handed out looseleaf, to your classes that you were teaching at at the time, did did having on the fly reader, read reviews like that help make the book better? Or did it just create a bunch of chaos, as you're trying to get it published?

GAYLON CAMPBELL 21:06

Working with students has been one of the greatest gifts for me, was really good to have that kind of review and feedback from students helped a lot helped me a lot, at least in putting the things in that needed to be there.

BRAD NEWBOLD 21:21

Do you remember any specific feedback or themes or patterns in general?

JOHN NORMAN 21:25

Well I think one of the things that students did, that certainly was important to me, in terms of fitting into the book better. And that was the array of problems at the end of the chapters. I mean, there weren't endless problems, there were only a few half dozen, maybe or even less sometimes. But they were thinking kinds of problems, they had to think hard about what they were doing and translate the ideas in the chapter into something of their own. The examples in the chapter were indispensable, even though they the problems at the end were different. The examples were a really, really important part. And that was a strong feedback. And like Gaylon, and I would say, the best part of my academic career was the time I spent with students, particularly graduate students. They're brilliant, they have so much potential. I mean, most of the students I've worked with were a lot smarter than I was, but they didn't know it. And they didn't have as much experience. And so it was a best kept secret, from my point of view for 50 years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:48

Was there a fear in any way that you're leaving out a lot of really, really good and interesting discussion of environmental science,

GAYLON CAMPBELL 22:56

the changes that were made between the first and second edition were pretty clearly needed by the things that were being published, by the time that we got out the second edition, my feeling is that things have not changed that much since we published the second edition that that it's still pretty well up to date.

BRAD NEWBOLD 23:19

This is the 25 year anniversary of its publication. It's still used widely internationally as well. How does something like this stay so relevant for so long?

JOHN NORMAN 23:30

Was Galen spagett, and sort of the basics of how you do this? I mean, science is mostly about knowledge, and a little bit about understanding. There's not a lot of wisdom in science. And Gaylon is a very wise person, he has a lot of wisdom. I think that someone with a lot of wisdom sees more than what's surrounding them. They see what's surrounding them, the interrelationships of everything. But they also see the past in the future to in in ways that mentally we we can't begin to appreciate, I think one of galas gifts is that his wisdom is powerful. And it's demonstrated in this book. I mean, one of the biggest challenges we face are the scaling issues of going from plot scale to continental scale. But the basics for doing that are in that book.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 24:36

Well I'd give some different interpretations of that. For one thing, I think the fundamentals aren't going to change very much. And they're the applications are the important part now and a lot of people have focused on that in the year since and discovered some wonderful things, but I think another part that that maybe is a little more cynical. Tanner published with one of his colleagues published papers like water, use efficiency in crops, research or re search, when you've lived as long as John and I have why you've seen an awful lot of re search that people don't learn the things that they cut out of a book or out of the literature, they go back and redo it again. And there seems to be a kind of a cycle in that it's about the length of a career. And so when one generation dies off, why the next generation starts over again. And so I think that environmental biophysics was a pretty hot topic. 25 years ago, it's probably less of a hot topic now. And at some point, somebody's going to come out with a whole new field. That really is environmental biophysics. But they think they've discovered it all again.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:04

Any thoughts on making a new revision? If not, or if so, what areas would you want to update or which areas would remain foundational and timeless?

JOHN NORMAN 26:14

A young scientist approached me some years ago and wanted to do a third edition. And so I had him write what he thought he wanted to change. And he sent it to me and I sent it to Gaylon, and we decided, well, give it a shot, see what you can do? Well, that was the last I heard og him! He never presented anything concrete beyond this, his first speculations about what he would like to change. I talked to him a few times since then. He's never brought it up. So I would guess that he might have realized it's a more daunting task than he thought, at first, not easy to put together a book, especially a book like that. No one else has ever approached me about doing a revision, there are certainly some things that we could adjust in it. And what would be nice would just be to do a third printing, because that's the first printing of the second edition had about 150 typos in it, then those got corrected in the second printing by the publisher. And then the second printing, I think there's at least another 50 titles, which we didn't get the first time around. And the students tend to find the mistakes, they're pretty good at that. And they really enjoy being able to rub it in a little bit. You know, to get the teachers stuck. Something so so that's a really a good system for debugging the book. But it shows you how incredibly difficult it is to write a book the only book I've seen that I've never that I've studied quite carefully that I've never found a typo in was will brutes arts book on boundary layer phenomena. That book I've never found a typo in it's probably the only technical book that I never found a typo in it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 28:29

Do you have any stories on how the the material of the book itself has impacted the research efforts of colleagues or students that you've mentored?

GAYLON CAMPBELL 28:38

One of the really enjoyable collaborations that I had at the university was with the Professor Jim King in zoology department. And he had students who were working on organism environment interaction with animals. He started sending his students to my class and understanding the environmental physics, the hand of organism environment interaction, really had a big effect on the work that they were able to do. And that was one of the some of the most enjoyable collaboration I had students working on snakes, that behavior and how it related to the environment, things that another student working on coat color and birds find black galds in places where you think they should be white, worked through the energy exchange with him and determined that the gold's actually knew something about their environmental physics. That would have been a stupid thing to have. I don't know why we thought they should.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:53

We do see fewer environmental biophysics positions at the university level than during the heart of your career. Do you have any thoughts on why you think that is? Is there a legitimate decline in this specific discipline? Is it just rebranding is it semantics where the positions are there, but we call them something else.

JOHN NORMAN 30:12

That's an example. I mean, one of my students who was actually in meteorology, he's now Chair of the Department of Agronomy, the students who go through these curricula, or through that book, in particular, I think it's important element can come from all kinds of disciplines and do their graduate work with using that book, or even just take a course or two that way, and then it gives them a versatility allows them in their career, more mobility, I think it can be invisible, I think the power of working across disciplines like this, it's possible for people to be able to be skilled in multiple disciplines, by tapping their creative resource within that they can be creative, and they don't have to be on the cutting edge of the center of that discipline, they can be changing that discipline and expanding it and growing it into past its traditional boundaries, the fact that the book hasn't stopped being published, and then the publisher must be selling books for the book still be out there because they're in the business of making money, which means that it's getting used in places that don't have the label of environmental biophysics. I think it's still relevant. And the whole biophysical field is still important. But it's not visible in the same way as the traditional disciplines are visible. Because those disciplines are our academic fossils, so to speak, all right, I mean, they're rigid. These boundaries across disciplines are not easy to change. They have real staying power, because their political and social as much as they are a scientific and so they're really imprinted on there. But when you're crossing the disciplines, which environmental biophysics does, by its very nature, I think people who had appeals to it gives them options that they would never have otherwise.

BRAD NEWBOLD 32:37

Along with that, how do you think that we could keep growing environmental biophysics or at least being able to generate excitement for this particular discipline?

JOHN NORMAN 32:48

One time I had a class of 30 students, and it came from the students came from 19 different departments, that tells me that these ideas of trying to understand the connections between things, because often the connections are more important than bulk of the information between the connections, these feedback systems that run across disciplinary boundaries and physical boundaries, those elaborate feedback systems in the living existence, I guess I have faith that this is going to keep happening. One of the Achilles heels of science right now is boundaries, boundaries are everywhere in science, all these disciplinary boundaries I mean social boundaries, political boundaries, boundaries in the Academy are a serious, serious limitation and their limitation and how we do our science as well. I think there's a growing appreciation of that, across all the different disciplines of science.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 33:54

I mean, you see a lot of classes that disappear because students quit taking him. But that hasn't been the case with environmental biophysics, that the number of students that Colin teaches now are pretty similar to the number of students that I taught when I taught there. It continues to be relevant to the students. If he quit teaching it, I suspect that it would disappear, because I don't know who else would teach it there. But as long as the course is well taught, I think there continue to be students who won't need it and will continue to take it.

BRAD NEWBOLD 34:33

I think we will finish with this question here. What advice would you give to young researchers it can be either in environmental biophysics or elsewhere who are just starting out their program.

JOHN NORMAN 34:48

A real hazard in science is to allow our personal biases to enter into what we're doing. How do you minimize that? This is a question I never asked myself until 80% of the way through my career. I can't claim to have minimized biases in my own career. But I think that the the thing that helped me most to not serve my biases was to have my primary motivation, you know, the center of my being, is what was important to me, my assets, this inner strength that you possess, that's a gift of life itself, that's really undefinable words, just never really touch it. With that kind of a central internal motivation, you have the best possibility of limiting your biases in the pursuit of the science that you're working in, because to do the science in a way that we all like to think it's being done, but often is not being done. You can't have your primary motivation to be the science itself. If it is, the possibility that you're resisting, your biases gets smaller and smaller and smaller, the more important that pursuit is to you. So in other words, if your total survival depends on your success in your pursuit, in this case, science as a scientist, then you're not going to be able to resist those things that are less than honorable or less than with integrity. When they cross paths with your sense of survival, in this mental process, we're going to do what we have to do to survive. And bias plays a big role in that and it's damaging, highly destructive to science. Find a way to be motivated by your essence, by your heart by this mystery of what life is about. And then you'll be able to do the extraordinarily challenging business of unbiased science.

GAYLON CAMPBELL 37:28

That was really good John. And I've you know had some similar ideas and thoughts. Seems to me that good advice would be to, to take the time to get a good set of tools, and not avoid the work of that. And then I would say, to work on real problems. John said back at the beginning of our discussion today that he that he liked the outdoors. And so that helped him through his career, to get out and look at real problems. And that was valuable to him. I grew up as a farmer, and so I didn't have any trouble enjoying being out where the real problems were. And throughout my career, it's always worked best to find out what the real problems were by going to the field and then coming back to the lab or the computer and working on those problems.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:29

Well, I think our time is up for today. We really do appreciate you both John and Gaylon, for stopping by to have this conversation with us. And it's been fascinating. It's been an amazing discussion, especially in the light of again, the 25 year anniversary of an introduction to environmental biophysics, a wonderful text that I'm sure we'll be used for many more years in the future. So again, thank you very much for this discussion. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World!

Contact us at metergroup.com or find us on twitter @meter_env

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Dr. Kim Novick is a professor, Paul H. O’Neill Chair, Fischer Faculty Fellow, and director of the Ph.D. Program in Environmental Sciences at Indiana University.  She earned her bachelor’s and Ph.D. in environmental science at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Her research areas span ecology and conservation, hydrology and water resources, and sustainability and sustainable development, with specific interests in land-atmosphere interactions, terrestrial carbon cycling, plant ecophysiology, and nature-based climate solutions.

Dr. Jessica Guo is a plant ecophysiologist and data scientist who studies plant-environment interactions under extreme climate conditions. She earned her bachelor’s in environmental biology from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in biological sciences from Northern Arizona University.  She is currently at the University of Arizona, where she blends her passion for reproducible workflows, interactive visualizations, and hierarchical Bayesian models with her expertise in plant water relations.

Links to learn more about Dr. Kim Novick:

Dr. Kim Novick on Google Scholar

Dr. Kim Novick on Wikipedia

Dr. Kim Novick's faculty page at Indiana University

Links to learn more about Dr. Jessica Guo:

Dr. Jessica Guo on GitHub

Dr. Jessica Guo on Google Scholar

Dr. Jessica Guo's faculty page at the University of Arizona

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Podcast Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00

Hello everybody, and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists, for scientists.

JESSICA GUO 0:07

That's not something I've all had been thinking about. But just thinking, yeah, there's, you know, we think about models that have these inputs, outputs. And then these parameters are what if the parameters themselves are dynamic? Does that mean we have to measure everything everywhere all at once to get them to work? In which case if we already measured everything everywhere all at once, then we would need these models now, would we? So? Yeah, thinking about how to incorporate the biology and the expected relationship to have that next layer of like, how do the parameters involved in something like that?

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:40

That's a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmospheric continuum. Today's guests are doctors Kim Novick and Jessica Guo. Dr. Kim Novick is a Professor Paul H. O Neill, chair, Fisher Faculty Fellow and Director of the Ph. D program in environmental sciences at Indiana University. She earned her bachelor's and PhD in Environmental Science at Duke University's Nikolas School of the Environment. Her research areas and specific interests are in land atmosphere interactions, terrestrial carbon cycling, plant eco physiology and nature based climate solutions. And Dr. Jessica Guo, is a plant eco physiologist and data scientist who studies plant environment interactions under extreme climate conditions. She earned her Bachelor's in environmental biology from Columbia University, and her PhD in biological sciences from Northern Arizona University. She is currently at the University of Arizona where she blends her passion for data science, with her expertise in plant water relations. And today, Kim and Jessica are both here to talk about their many research projects. So thank you so much for being with us today.

KIM NOVICK 1:58

I'm happy to be here.

JESSICA GUO 2:00

Thanks for having us.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:01

All right. So definitely today we wanted to talk about and get into your projects and research interests. But first, can you just tell us a little bit about your background. So we'd like to know how you got into the sciences in general and how you worked your way into the fields and specialties of environmental and climate studies. So I don't know, Kim, if you if you want to go first with that.

KIM NOVICK 2:23

Sure yeah, I'd be happy to. You know, my path started as an undergrad I elected to major in Civil and Environmental Engineering has born out of just sort of a general affinity for math and physics and of the engineering majors that were available at the university I attended. Civil and Environmental Engineering seemed like it offered the most potential to sort of do good in the world. And it was, I think, my junior year, I participated in a field trip out to a set of ameriflux towers in the forest run at at the time, and for the duration of their existence by Professor Gabby, a tool. And we got to climb the towers, which was really fun and exciting. And I thought, well, that might be an interesting way to spend a summer. So I emailed Gabby to see if he was accepting undergraduate research assistants. And he sent me a very short reply, send me your transcripts. And I did, I guess it passed muster. Because that turned into a really excellent summer research experience that turned into a senior's honors thesis, that after a few years out, working in the NGO sector, eventually turned into my PhD. And so you know, most of what I've been doing since is working to apply what I learned about measuring land atmosphere, fluxes of carbon, water and energy, to understand eco physiological processes and a range of skills, but also to apply that knowledge to solve practical problems, as I like to think of it, for example, concerning questions surrounding nature based climate solutions, and drought monitoring, in this sort of applications.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:05

Great. And Jessica, how about you?

JESSICA GUO 4:09

Yeah, so I'm, I'm from Arizona from Phoenix and I couldn't wait to get out of the state Nevada and back here now but at the time, it was like New York City that's about as different from Phoenix is like, I my mind at the time, imagine? And I got in with the E three B department ecology, evolution, and environmental biology. And yeah, I took took all the courses they had did a summer research internship in forest ecology and Wisconsin Madison. There's a lot of pretty classical and community ecology driven questions. But my one of my mentors Shahidi Naeem wasn't interested in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and that really got me thinking about the functioning and kind of functional trait side which is still you know, still a very popular field now. And when I went to Northern Arizona University I, you know, wanted wanted to dig deeper into mechanism. And so that leads me to plant eco physiology. My master's project was on a trying to do plant eco physiology at the community scale. It involved a lot of fieldwork, a lot of lab work and yield the data that were not easily analyzable. So that's when I kind of took another turn towards more quantitative approaches. Data Science wasn't actually a very popular term, at least not in my not in my world back then. So I didn't call it data science. But I went on in search of a more quantitative, more quantitative tools, because ecology data just is messy, it is not going to fit neatly and to the criteria that are required for some of these tests. So I sought my advisor Kuna Ogle, and the rest is history, as they say, because I took to Bayesian modeling, is I found it very useful. And so I can still work on the questions. And I'm very driven by you know, how do plants cope with changing climate? At which timescales are they're responding? And then I have this tool that has served me and, and yeah, so it turns on, I'm back in Arizona, I do love Arizona. It's a great state in many way, many ways. But it turns out, it took leaving to figure that out for me.

BRAD NEWBOLD 6:19

That's often the case, isn't it? Right. So we've had podcast episodes, where we've had multiple guests on the same time. But this is the first episode, where we've had collaborators together to discuss their projects. And so could you tell us a little bit about how you first came to become collaborators and begin to work together on research projects.

KIM NOVICK 6:40

I would love to tell that story. I met just at the AGU conference. And I think we disagree on the year in my mind, it was 2019. But it might have been 2018. I walked by her poster, and I saw something on her poster I had never seen before, which was a continuous record of plant water content data. So she had been measuring. It was really stem water potential using psychometry that our field research sites Outlast. And I didn't know at the time that this was possible. And I was just amazed by these beautiful figures, I saw just this poster. Because what it showed for me is that it would be possible to measure the water potential of plants at timescales over which things like temperature and humidity very, which could really allow us, you know, the opportunity to answer questions about how plants stalemates respond to drought stress that that really have not historically been possible to answer using more discrete datasets. So that's certainly how we met. And from there, we've just been thinking over the years about ways to enable those observations to be collected and more sites and also to create Pentwater potential databases that are that are more accessible and open for the broader community. But we can definitely trace it back to that poster, where we also bonded over the fact that we had both received a AGU biogeosciences travel grant for parents of young children at the time. So I think that my my daughter is about a year older, or maybe about the same age as justice. So that was obvious from her poster. So we had a chat about that as well.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:29

Is that how you remember it, Jessica?

JESSICA GUO 8:31

I do. I remember it because I think that year was I mean, that was my year I had I had a baby. I had a poster I was ready to go. That was really my first real AGU. And I remember I they were giving out these pins that said job seeker. It was kind of like, Oh, Kim Novick. I mean, I've read her work. This is amazing. She's at my poster. She thinks my poster I figures are cool. Kind of like hey, like I have this job seeker. And she's like, well, I they need to make one for me. That's called grant seeker. I remember her saying that. And so I think that also, it was like, okay, grant so good. That's what we need then to make this work. How can we work together of course, things take time, I stuck it out long enough in academia to for some of those things to come to fruition. But I also want to give a shout out to George Koch, who really, you know, it was it was his instruments he had gotten a grant and was kind enough to lend them to me for the duration of my dissertation research and taught me showed me the ropes taught me how to use these instruments. And later on I figured out that not not not everyone most people don't have a George Koch in their lives. And so, this technology is not really accessible even I mean even if you did get a grant and purchase these instruments, just the know how and how to install them and keep them functional and like and then what how to deal with you go from you know spot measurements of plant water potential to time series of the half hourly scale like then you have to deal with the data side of side of things. Yeah, so it takes a lot to get there. And I think that's one of the things that motivated us is like, okay, so how can we feel this up? You know, not just me and Kim and maybe a handful of other people who are really, really invested. But how can this, you know, there's so many, there's so many questions. There's so many species, so many and a great sense of urgency, I think, to our work as well. So how do we put that make that available to others?

BRAD NEWBOLD 10:25

Right? I know that those that know us here at METER Group know that we are water potential super fans, and feel that it is a measurement that should be included in any kind of research dealing with questions surrounding soil moisture, or exploring the behavior movement of water all throughout the soil plant atmosphere continuum. Can you give us a little background? For those in our audience who might not be super familiar with water potential? Can you give a little background into into what it is and how you use it in applications in your specific research interest?

KIM NOVICK 10:59

Yeah, I'll be happy to take a try at answering that question and then maybe Jess can follow up, I'll start by focusing on the soils. Where it's, you know, soil water potential is long been a core hydrologic variable. You know, if you take a college level hydrology course, you're going to be introduced to the concept, it's usually negative in soil. So you can think of it as a measure of the tension under which water is bound to the soil. And it is gradients in water potential that move water from one soil layer to another, or from one place in the soil to another, that also gradients in water potential between soils and plants, the move water through plants, and then eventually to the atmosphere. You know, it's a variable that shows up in Darcy's Law and it shows up in Richards Hydrology Equation. But at least in my world, it's not a variable that we routinely measure in the field. I think that we certainly should do that more often. And I applaud NIDA for providing us with some instruments to make that possible. But historically, in ecological research or ecosystem science research, we measure soil moisture content, which is a little bit different. It's the volume of water in the soil, not so much the pressure under which it is bound. And there are some some things you can do some tricks, you can try to convert between soil moisture, and soil water potential. But depending on which tools you are using, these can end up being very uncertain conversions. But the truth is for many of the questions that we seek to ask such as, you know, what determines us to model results, responses to decline soil water, or what determines the water potentials within the plant that can ultimately drive drought driven plant mortality, we really need to know water potential. And so we are very enthusiastic about on the one hand, motivating the community to either make more instrument measurements of soil water potential in situ, or to do some of those lab derived water retention curves, that can allow us to make this site specific comparisons. But also just to recognize that, you know, when we want to understand how plants are responding to the environment, it is water potential that is ultimately the more relevant driver most of the time than soil moisture content. And then I maybe I'll punted to Jess who might be able to tell us a few things about about the water potential in plants.

JESSICA GUO 13:27

Well, that's just like as as, as was alluded to, to it's just a key measurement that should be measured with a lot of other when you're measuring a lot of other things about how a plant is functioning, say photosynthesis or other fluxes, it's nice to get a sense of what's the water status of the plant. And so I think that in that regard, measuring plant water potential is, is key to understanding right and so, in planning your physiology, we don't have the same kind of functional tray where you can take one measurement, and that represents a certain characteristic of a plant, we often look at how it changes along gradient, so kind of like you know, ACI curves, where you change the level of co2 inside your chamber and measure the photosynthesis, how photosynthesis react so that in plant water relations, we often look at as the leaf or the branch dries down and the water potential becomes even more negative. How does that affect the hydraulic properties of the tissue of the conductive tissue in that stem or in that leaf and so that can give us parameters such as, so vulnerability curves can give us something like p 50, or the water potential at which 50% of the maximum conductivity is lost. And as if you're doing this on leaves you can get at things like trigger loss point at what point to the leaves lose their trigger and collapse and generally is considered not not reversible from there. So those are important factors that we you know, in a lot of traditional ecology work we want to know like which species are more vulnerable, which species are less vulnerable? under climate change? What can we expect from species A versus species B? And so, yeah, the water potential is quite critical to all of those. And those are more kind of snapshot maybe parameters, but with the, with some technologies that are monitoring both soil water potential continuously, and are also possible to measure plant water potential continuously, can get at some of those other timescales of question, like what happens when, you know a rain of event happens? Or what happens during a heatwave? That wasn't previously possible with the manual measurement?

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:37

Right, right. Can you speak to, I guess, go into a little bit more detail on some of the successes that you've had in making water potential measurements in soil or plants.

KIM NOVICK 15:47

I'd love to hear Jess tell us a little bit more about her work on the creosote and the other charismatic species we find in the in the southwest, because she's, again, I think, really pushing the envelope in terms of what's possible for for measurements and plants out there.

JESSICA GUO 16:04

Oh, sure. Thanks, Kim. Um, yeah, so the creosote bush Larrea tridentata, is this very drought tolerant shrub, and it's, it's just known in the literature for going down to pretty negative, pretty extreme water potentials. And so, because of an, you know, desert shrub, not very fast growing, it's, it's unusual, in many ways, and it's, surprisingly, really has really taken to being sent monitor for the stem water potential. And so the way these these products work is that you expose the surface of the xylem, and you attach a sensor to it, you seal it really well. But that can be affected by things like the wounding response of the plant or plant tissue growing into the sensor, you do have to rotate them. And so I, you know, and I look back on it, I think all of us can have, you know, down moments where we're like, oh, man, that was just bad luck, I missed out on this opportunity or that opportunity. But I really have to say that I had just the incredible luck of being able to learn about the sensors from George Koch, and working in a system when I was at ASU, temporarily at ASU to work with a tree, a shrub of plant species that just really worked very well with the sensors. And so yeah, the time series produce there, because of the variability in the Sonoran Desert, you know, really dry periods, followed by really wet dynamic periods, experiencing all those different environmental conditions, you can also see that variability so clearly in the water potential time series. And it's led me to think differently about, you know, kind of classifying entire species, as, you know, very drought tolerant or very drought avoided, because, you know, plants are living organisms, and they, especially, I think, if they're in environments where the conditions are known to be evolved for these conditions that are, you know, go from extremes, they have can have different strategies for those different times.

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:05

You're talking about extreme areas, and I think a lot of our audience might be familiar with permanent wilting point. What are the plants that you're studying out in the extreme, you know, Sonoran deserts and other places? What is their tolerance level?

JESSICA GUO 18:19

I'm sure the creosote has a permanent wilting point, because if you push the envelope far enough, you know, plants aren't not going to be able to handle that. But I've recorded water potentials of predawn water potentials increase out of down to negative nine,

BRAD NEWBOLD 18:33

mega Pascal's mega Pascal's sorry, okay. Yeah,

JESSICA GUO 18:37

negative nine megapascals. How does that 90 bar and so and I think this particular plant, it is on the extreme, right, so it has properties that lead it. So even after the leaves lose turgor, they're able to after rainfall, recover and keep growing is not typical, I think of plants. And so yeah. There is a species in Australia that I've read of having more negative water potentials than that, but I think that's about that's about it. That's why Yeah, I don't know what the permanent wilting

BRAD NEWBOLD 19:12

point. haven't got there yet. That's super interesting. What are some of the other difficulties you have encountered in measuring water potential?

JESSICA GUO 19:22

Well, um, so when you're working with something as water potentials as negative as Korea, so running out of gas is like the number one fear that I have. For my dissertation study, and enough for some current work, my plan is just whole hog deliver a whole giant tank of pressure, pressurized air to the site, and to avoid that problem, the small portable tanks just never know when you're going to run out. And then it takes it also takes a lot longer. So some people you know, are like, oh, yeah, you can go out and measure like 30 plants, and I'm like well the amount of time that you it takes to get down to like a negative six or negative nine. It just you can you can do fewer samples, and then you have to let the air out slowly sometimes as well. So that's one thing that in my favor are that the creases are short. So I don't have to do any kind of pull pruning. I just heard from a I have done the like a blooming and pole pruning before and some Aspen's, that was really tough and physical. I just heard from someone at NAU, the other week about carbon fiber window washing poles. I don't know if Kim if this is something that you guys could explore. Apparently, they're pricey, but it might be worth it. He's like, Yeah, you can just lift it with one hand. Oh!

BRAD NEWBOLD 20:45

There you go.

KIM NOVICK 20:47

Well have to look into it, I have to say, you know, I'm joking, but I only only 50% Joking, when I say 50% of sort of the work that Jess and I are doing right now. It's just to allow my lab group to avoid future pre Dawn measures. Because while I have many, many, you know, very dedicated postdocs and students that I'm lucky enough to work with, personally, I hate them. And I hate having to ask people to do them. It's, it's hard. And we work in tall forests. So our trees are 30 plus meters tall. And it's hard enough to access the leaves when the sun is shining. And it's really hard to get to them in the pitch black darkness. You know, the the benefit of this predawn measurements is that it gives you a proxy for what the soil water potential is over the you know, integrated root zone. So we're always sort of scratching our heads to think of there might be other ways that we can get it that that don't involve driving an an, 80 foot, boom, lift around in the dark, at 4:30 in the morning. But it's hard when you work in big forest, accessing at the top of the canopy is a real challenge for us. We tried everything we do we have the slingshots, we get the boom lift out, it's really a cherry picker track and we go up that way. But then we're sort of limited to trees that grow by the little road. Some some groups are able to access leaves from their Eddy covariance towers, but ours isn't quite close enough to any of the trees. So that doesn't work for us. We are prohibited from firing a shotgun in our research area. So that's off the table. But it is it is one of the biggest headaches of our work is just getting to the leaves of these of these tall trees.

BRAD NEWBOLD 22:27

How about measuring water potential in soils? What are some of the difficulties there?

KIM NOVICK 22:33

Interesting question, because I think we're still not at the point where we have, you know, perfect sensors for the task. But we have sensors that are better than they were historically. And so when I tried to think about why is it the case that most of the time and field research settings, typically in the Eco logical and ecosystem science community, we measure soil moisture instead of soil water potential. I think it's because simply the measurements historically been easier for soil moisture content. You know, we're just starting to get to the point where we're installing Institute of soil water potential sensors. TEROS 21? I think I got it right. And we can quite pleased with those so far. You know, but we work in in fairly music environments, we would never see plant water potentials of negative nine MPa, you know, in our worst droughts, you know, maybe the soil gets down to negative two or three MPa. So we're working within a much more limited range. But you know, we're, if I can just take a second to mention to sort of broader efforts to increase the collection of these sorts of measurements through the ameriflux networks to your water. There's sort of two things going on, on the one hand ameriflux, which is a network of Eddy covariance Fox towers for North and South America. It has has purchased and sent out to individual sites, a wide array of in situ so the water potential sensors, I think we just started to see them installed this summer. And it'd be really exciting to get those data back and see how they can help us interpret the fluxes. Another major initiative is being led by my lab together with rich Phillips, who's at IU down in the biology department and ameriflux, where we are doing generating site level water retention curves, using equipment provided by meter, which is just a few doors down from where I'm sitting right now. And the idea is that we are asking ameriflux PI's to send us their soils, we send out a sampling kits and they are to collect somewhere in the ballpark of fall soil course, from three different depths, maybe four different profiles, send it back to us. And we're analyzing those samples for saturated hydraulic conductivity and the water retention curve, flow texture and find rate density, which is data that will again return to the network. And so the hope is that, you know, we're beginning to generate the information necessary Sorry to transform those historic observations of soil moisture content into estimates of soil water potential, which I am really excited to see how this plays out, because it's so common in our field to relate some sort of ecosystem process, maybe it's GPP, which is canopy scale photosynthesis, or evapotranspiration, or, or model or surface conductance, the soil moisture content. And so frequently, we see that those relationships appear to be threshold driven, right, there's some range of soil moisture, where we don't see much of a change in photosynthesis or conductance, and then we reach what appears to be a critical threshold. And then And then things start to decline rapidly. And the hypothesis that we're looking forward to testing is that a lot of the nature of that apparent threshold relationship is really driven by by the soil and water retention characteristics of the soil so that if we switched out the x axis from soil moisture content to soil water potential, we might see much, far more linear relationships, and reduce a lot of the heterogeneity from one site to the next. Stay tuned. We will be making an announcement soon to collect more soils as part of that project. And I want to particularly acknowledge Daniel Beverley, who's a postdoc that's been really driving that project forward together with Alexander Crookshanks, who's a postmark research assistant, who I'm pretty sure at some point in the near future will be pursuing graduate school applications. Awesome. Keep your eye out for her. That's awesome.

BRAD NEWBOLD 26:31

Kim you talk about seeing Jessica's poster for the first time and one of the things that really piqued your interest was her continuous data? Why was that of interest to you at that time,

KIM NOVICK 26:41

we've been historically my group and many others have been interested in understanding how plants respond to drought stress of course, but specifically how they respond to both drying soil and also trying air right. So dry soil we can measure as a function of soil moisture content or more ideally swing water potential and the air and you know, the best proxy is the vapor pressure deficit. So, the difference between the amount of air the atmosphere can actually hold and then and then the actual water vapor content. And so you know, as a as a drought unfolds, usually soil water declines, but often the vapor pressure deficit also goes up. And these things tend to happen together. So through land atmosphere feedbacks, a soil moisture, dret VPD goes up, the plants can respond independently to each rests. So if you can grow a plant in an environment where PPD rises, the soil moisture stays the same, you will still see declines in some model conductance and photosynthesis driven by plants actively closing their stomates to avoid excessive water loss to this drier first year atmosphere. But because these things tend to go together, using you know, data collected at weekly or monthly timescales, it's very hard to disentangle the two, all right, however, it is very straightforward. To do it when you have continuous data, because over the course of a day, or even a couple of days, usually soil water tends to be relatively stationary, whereas VPD can vary quite a bit. And so you can leverage this, these different timescales of variation, together with continuous measurements of whatever response variable you're interested in looking at, and be able to disentangle the vapor pressure deficit from soil moisture impacts on plant function. And we've been able to do this quite well. There's no no shortage of studies that are doing this looking using data from Eddy covariance flux towers, which come in and a half hourly, or hourly timescale, and also from set flux measurements of tree water use, which are also made continuously. But the potential table to do the same thing. And perform complimentary analyses on continuous measurements of plant water potential, would really allow us to connect the dots in a way that we haven't been able to do so before.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:04

Anything to add to that, Jessica.

JESSICA GUO 29:06

I think I just want to reflect that like the it's, it was amazing that Kim saw that was immediately like honed in on Oh, wow, that is a game changer. Because I had tried to pitch this same idea was like, Oh, we're gonna go from these manual measurements, Spot measurements, continuous measurements to various other you know, as a grad student, small grants to support and they generally just came back as review it as like, not very, you know, there's sensors for everything. You know, like what's so exciting about you using a sensor that doesn't sound all that novel, but it really is novel in the sphere because of what what's never, it's never been able to measure before. And because of all the difficulties you were you just spent some time describing to get pre dogs. And I think pairing that with other sensors like at the same time scale. I think that's really where a lot of my interest also lies like sap flow, and I haven't used these myself but other people use the drop stem dramaturgs and But maybe there could be people measure wood water content. And so pairing these together looking to just like, it's still a wide open question, I think like, what are some of the good proxies, maybe there's some good relationships between these, I personally think that being able to instrument, a plant with water potential, maybe soil water potential, the sap flow in the stem, and then a branch of STEM water potential looking at that gradient, we can calculate hydraulic conductivity in situ, and see how that changes, you know that versus you know, harvesting a stem and doing those dry down measurements I mentioned before in a lab setting like doing that on living tree, or shrub as the, as the environment is changing as the VPD, or the soil moisture content might be changing. I think that just gets us closer to like, closer to the mechanism of what the plants are actually doing. Right? Instead of extrapolating from snapshots.

BRAD NEWBOLD 30:52

And extrapolating from snapshots, how then can we work with these more powerful modeling systems to work with the data that we have, or maybe kind of overcome, I don't wanna say overcome the limitations of the sensors, because, you know, garbage in garbage out when you're dealing with with the data. But in your practice, and in your experience, how have you been able to better model these complex processes within soil? Plant water interaction, sir?

JESSICA GUO 31:20

Yeah, thanks for that question. I think about a lot like how the plant itself is responding. So the biology is really interesting to me. And the, but the biology is still, you know, there's still inputs right there. So the plants are sensing the external environment and then responding in a particular way, depending on those conditions. And so one way I've been, like taking this snapshot approach, but like having these longer time series, using the same kind of theoretical framework is being able to see, okay, well, how did these parameters themselves change over time? And can we expect a especially something you know, it's pretty obvious that a creosote because they're an evergreen species, and in June, they look just mostly dead. They don't look all that they keep their leaves. Leaves are brown at that point. But they're still living. And they're still photosynthesizing. And so like, it's just natural to Okay, well, clearly, creosote at this point isn't behaving the same way or responding to the environment in the same way as it does in a wetter, more, more suitable a time period. And so yeah, I think that matters a lot for these flexes, right, like, you know, creases are really dominant. And across these deserts are some places where it's pretty much creases, the only major woody plant out there, they might not be highly productive. They're not as productive as other ecosystems, but that variability, they account for a lot of the variability in the carbon cycle. And so yeah, and then, if we, if we try to then put a snapshot parameter into a into one of these biophysical models that you know, have lots of equate lots of systems of equations that explain our best, or that represent our best understanding of how Photosynthesis Photosynthesis works, what's going to underestimate or maybe overestimate, but mostly underestimate what's going to happen, because you're like, it's a drought tolerant plant, its parameters are really low. That's not something I've alone had been thinking about. But just thinking, yeah, there's, you know, we think about models that having these inputs, outputs, and then these parameters, but what if the parameters themselves? are dynamic? Do does that mean we have to measure everything everywhere all at once to get them to work? In which case if we already measured everything everywhere, all at once that we would need these models now? Would we? So? Yeah, thinking about how to incorporate the biology in the expected relationship to have that next layer of like, how do the parameters evolve? That's something that that I've been thinking about.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:48

Alright. We have been hearing about your efforts towards standardizing a national meteorological network that would include water potential measurements, and you've published and presented on this topic, can you tell us a little bit more about this idea and the goals surrounding this potential network?

KIM NOVICK 34:06

We'd be thrilled to do that. So the network is called tsinet. Because we often abbreviate water potential with the Greek letter tsi, T-S-I-N-E-T, tsinet. And I think just a little bit of background, that's an idea that's been in you know, we've been kicking the the idea around for a few years now and it involves a much broader team of collaborators than just Jess and I. But, you know, the original idea sort of, was born out of two things. The first is sort of the recognition that in many fields of ecosystem ecology, or you know, eco physiological research, we have developed these really accessible and open databases, whereby, you know, individual site PIs will collect data and then you Frequently voluntarily share the data to networks like ameriflux, or flux net or set flux net in a way that they are, they're accessible and open to the global community. Now, just to take a step back, I mentioned earlier in our discussion how I started my PhD work on on some ameriflux towers in the do force. And I really didn't know much about the scientific enterprise at the time. But what I knew I learned from from my advisor and the lab group, but Jessica we collect these measurements, and we use them to answer questions we're interested in, but we also give the data to the network. Simple, that makes sense. That must be how science is done. And it took me a long time to realize that that the flux community in America community and SR networks across the world were really kind of on the leading edge of sort of this transition to open, accessible data sharing. And so I'm very lucky, I think, to have been sort of brought up in a community that places such a high value on that service. You know, the other observation is when we when I think about plant hydraulics, research, and eco physiological research more generally, specifically, when it concerns the function of things like plant stalemates, I get the impression that we're a very theory rich, but data poor fields, which might be a bit of a surprising statement to some. So to say exactly what I mean, I think, you know, there's the the functioning of plants domains, which on the one hand is relatively quite straightforward, they're either relatively more open a relatively more closed, it's, on the other hand, so complex, right, especially when we want to connect those dynamics to what's happening with water flows through the stem, and what's happening through the soils and what's happening in terms of plant risk of, of mortality. And so we see these very beautiful papers being written all the time, they're largely modeling papers, the present different ways to model that dynamic system model function, which is a really noble goal, I mean, some other the pathway by which co2 enters plants through photosynthesis. And that's the pathway by which most of the energy just to support most life on Earth is created. So that's an important thing to study, we've got all these models is very nice mathematical models. But as soon as that we lack the data necessary to evaluate and cross compare them, because particularly when we're thinking about water potential, but also I would argue some of the other traits that are really important pieces of the puzzle, we do not yet have these open, accessible databases of the time series of water potential, that are necessary to link environmental drivers to sort of ecosystem scale responses, like photosynthesis, and evapotranspiration, so we're hoping to fill that gap by creating a database that would aggregate pre existing and new observations of plant and soil water potential. And we will happily accept observations made with pressure chambers. So discrete plant water potential observations, as well as, you know, increasingly frequent attempts to measure those data continuously. And so we're really excited to kick the project off, we're gonna pair it with a lot of you know, in addition to building, let's say, a network of data, we're also excited about building a network of people. So there will be a lot of programming associated with a network webinars and early career training opportunities. And a graduate distributed graduate seminar down the line workshops, conference sessions, that sort of thing. But yeah, it's been it's been years in the works. And so we're really, really excited to get it kicked off this year.

BRAD NEWBOLD 38:36

That's awesome. Along with that, as well. And you talked about Yeah, building this kind of community of researchers as well. Are you interested then and also improving or creating kind of best practices when it comes to observations and measurements within and interpretations of water potential data?

JESSICA GUO 38:55

Definitely, I think that's part, a large part of where the network of people comes in. I think, you know, people are trained in their labs and their advisors were taught by their advisors. And there's these different lineages sometimes of how we do things, even though it's, you know, especially with the pressure chamber, it seems like it's a fairly standard thing, but it turns out it's not. And there was a really nice paper that came out recently by Celia Rodriguez Dominguez on on this that reflected some of these experiments, they took, oh, it doesn't matter if you do it this one particular way versus this other way. And so we want to collect some of that, like, how do we like first of all, even just like for too big a database at all, like what is the standard data reporting format? Can we agree on that as you know, as kind of a field and we want as many people's thoughts and opinions on this as we can get? I only know the way that I was trained, really. And so it's been eye opening in some of these conversations. We've had to build dinette across the globe, really international team of researchers that we have different takes on this and I think it's also because is very plant specific. And that's a lot of the problem with some of these instruments that are plant instruments is like, what works for you what one species is just plainly not going to work for someone else depends on if there's resin? Or if you know, for pressure chamber methods, it's like, how big are your leaves? How big are your petioles? Like, will fit like I, you know, all kinds of things, are you trying to get a snapshot of lots of lots of different species are you focused on like the variation within a species or within even different branches of the same individual. And so those are all things we're going to have to consider. We do want to develop some kind of data reporting formats, and also best practices for the stem psychrometer. I think that's something that folks are interested in learning. But again, if they don't have a personal connection, or like, have this lineage of learning of passing on the knowledge from someone who knows, it can be really tricky. And I have had the opportunity to work with some folks who have these instruments have had trouble with them. And just went, you know, there's something you know, there's a lot we can do over the internet, and with these webinars, and we're gonna have a lot of them. But the the training, one of the one of which will be fist fest, really gives us an opportunity to provide some hands on some of these things. It's hard to describe or say what it is we're doing, but it's really, really necessary to show rather than tell. Because there's a lot of things I'm excited about.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:24

Right now, what is the timeline looking at for where it's off the ground, and you know, you got the ball rolling, and things are looking good?

KIM NOVICK 41:30

Sure. So I in fact, it hasn't officially started yet. But we hope to move quickly. Once it does, you know, sort of our early goals will be supporting some of these early career training workshops. As I just mentioned, fist fest, we also have connections to Flux corpse just sort of emerged from the attic, various community, but we're excited to, to bring water potential to Flux course, at least a little bit next year. We are very, you know, I hope we hope that within the first few months of the project, we'll be opening the call for submission of pressure chamber water potential measurements and associated meter logical observations. And in that regard, we will owe a pretty big debt to the folks that run SAP flux net, who have already begun to do some of this work for the sites to learn that work. So they can sort of piggyback off of what they've learned from that experience. The project I mentioned, collecting the water retention curves, and the mere flux sites will be an important, I think, early way to populate. So a lot of potential information into the database. But you can look for us to be having webinars and organizing cockpit sessions, and beaten on your door asking for your data. But as we do, and we recognize that these data are hard fought, you know, we discussed some of the difficulties associated with feet on measurements and working in tall forests already. So we're also thinking through the right incentives, to motivate people to want to share their data with the network. And also ways to properly reward and attribute What are frequently the early career scientists that collected the data.

JESSICA GUO 43:11

Oh, and just just be on the lookout, we, one of the first things we're going to do is put out a call for membership on our working groups. And so and one of the first working groups will be the data working group where we're going to Yeah, see people's input on these data reporting formats and awesome. And yeah, survey them about how, what would they be incentivized by? What would work for them? What would incentivize them to share their data and, and make it easier? Or, you know, it's always a little bit of a leap to like, take the data from a format that you're used to working with to make it a format that someone else can also find it useful, right? What would what would make that process a bit more streamlined?

BRAD NEWBOLD 43:51

Yeah. What do you see as the future of this research either within your, your own particular specialty, or within this, this idea of of a network of interconnected researchers who are looking at Eco physiology or solar or plants water potentials?

KIM NOVICK 44:07

Yeah, I can take your first stab at that, you know, we already mentioned sort of the challenge of, of getting these processes, right and models and so I'm hopeful that the database that will build can enable progress on that front, where it's currently been hindered by just a lack of systematic representative open data, you know, from from a wide range of sites. Another really, I think, exciting friends here concerns our ability to measure really important features of not only canopy water use, but also canopy water content remotely. So we have it's just amazing to me how rapidly the satellite platforms are developing. We have eco stress and orbit on the on the spaceship station that can provide a proxy of VT at the scale of it. Individual farm fields, which is really amazing. We also have a growing interest in the use of vegetation, optical depth measurements, or VOD as a proxy for water contents. And here, I really want to credit Alex koenings Visit Stanford and is part of signups for kind of really helping to develop those approaches and spread them throughout the community. And so what's really exciting is, I think the opportunity to pair a much more representative dataset of ground observations of water potential. And, and ideally, oftentimes co located with with measurements of the fluxes themselves, whether it's from flux's towers or soft flux, as ground truthing, and reality check data on what we're seeing from space, because that could really open the door to new ways to characterize not only plant water stress, or, or vegetation, water stress or drought stress. But also I mean, thinking about you know, we you don't have to connect too many dots to see that this presents the possibility for whole new ways to conceive water retention curves, ecosystem water retention curve or to, to think about how to understand the relationships between water content and water potential are really core skills. So I'm really excited to see, you know, where how far we can get in that direction over the coming years.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:23

Jessica, your thoughts on the future? In this regard?

JESSICA GUO 46:26

Yeah, well, Kim covered a very nicely, there's a lot of there's a lot of things, we don't even know that it could it could be, it could be useful for validation datasets for these newer data, newer data platforms. But, you know, I think it can also be really useful for kind of really standard questions in plant eco physiology, you know, this assumption that predawn water potential is a proxy for the soil water potential in the root zone, that Kim mentioned earlier. You know, that's not always going to be the case. And there's, there's individual papers that have gone out there and done fine scale measurements to show that that's not always the case. But we don't have a good idea across the board, like under what conditions can we does assumption hold or species. There's this assumption hold, and under what conditions do we have to, you know, revisit this assumption. And so, you know, the power of the database of people working at different in different places with different interest species is that it will really allow us to, I think, have I anticipate lots of synthesis coming out of this, including some really standard kind of, you know, I was also thinking to like, early on driven, like, my questions maybe don't seem very sophisticated, because some of the things were literally like, how does water potential affected by soil moisture content and VPD? Like the dryness of the atmosphere? And it's like, shouldn't we know that already? Like, that's a pretty stale as a plant environment interaction question. That's you people have been asking, we have had the tools to answer for a long time. But to answer those questions more systematically in a synthetic way that accounts for what we know are different about different species in an environment. That's been really hard to do because of the paucity of data.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:04

Well, thank you both for taking your time. I just wanted to ask if there's any place that our listeners can go if they want to learn more about your various research projects?

KIM NOVICK 48:15

Yeah, we're a little too early to throw out a signup web address or email address but um folks are welcome to email me. At early Google gold name, not too hard to find the username so feel free to find me and record Indiana University and shoot me an email.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:39

Alright and Jessica?

JESSICA GUO 48:42

Same you can find me just google whoa.github.io

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:48

Stay safe, and we'll see you next time on We Measure the World!

Contact us at metergroup.com or find us on twitter @meter_env

Transcribed by https://otter.ai