Ecohydrology

Catalog description

The objective of this course is to investigate novel topics that involve the interactions between physical hydrological processes and ecosystem processes, including the impacts of human activities on the ecohydrological system. The course is designed to encourage teams of students from historically disparate disciplines to collaboratively combine their unique skills and insights to answer multidisciplinary ecohydrological questions. This course will consider a broad range scales from a stomate and a soil pore to a forest, watershed, and region, with emphasis placed on those scales and systems most appropriate to student interests. Through course work we will clarify the current understanding of various topics, identify knowledge gaps, develop hypotheses, and test them quantitatively by creating models and analyzing available data. The goal of this course is to identify the basic principles of ecohydrology and become familiar and comfortable with a range of quantitative tools and approaches for answering ecohydrological questions.