Commentary to be published in Ecohydrology
A commentary written by Lizzie King and Kelly will soon appear in the journal Ecohydrology.
Our group has entered a bit of a “meta-analysis” phase, and the leading edge of this effort is our newest publication, which is a commentary in Ecohydrology authored by Lizzie King and Kelly. We conducted an “exhaustive” literature review (exhaustive in this context means it exhausted us, not necessarily the literature) into the nature of ecohydrological literature over the past fifteen years. Our goal is to determine the extent to which ecohydrology (the intersection of ecological and hydrological sciences) is a marriage of convenience or one of opportunity. We find that (unsurprisingly) most articles in ecohydrology tend to borrow from the shared aspects of the parent disciplines rather than exploiting the unique and most powerful approaches from each. Specifically, we find that hydrological strengths in the form of modeling studies are much more prevalent than ecological strengths of manipulative experimentation and hypothesis-testing, and the two approaches are almost entirely decoupled in ecohydrological studies. Our conclusion is that there remains a great opportunity to leverage the strengths of ecological and hydrological traditions to more aggressively build our understanding of coupled ecological and hydrological system function.