Geosciences Graduate Student Earns NASA Fellowship

UPDATE


Assessing how changes in our climate are affecting ecosystems and hydrosystems is vitally important – unfortunately, in many ways, assessing these changes is much simpler in woody mountain ranges than it is in the semi-arid ecosystems that dominate much of the west.
The most common tools for conducting large-scale terrain studies are with remote sensing, such as lidar, However, these tools use large or leafy biomass (think: forests) to gauge vegetation and hydrologic changes on a grand scale.
But as geosciences doctoral student Nayani Ilangakoon explained, western ecosystems often contain short-height vegetation structures, like sagebrush, which are critical for balancing global carbon dioxide levels – but aren’t as easily captured by remote sensing and traditional discrete return lidar. Sagebrush also are particularly susceptible to human disturbances and land use, as well as natural disturbances like drought, fire and climate change – all of which impact the ecosystem structure and hence the hydrologic cycle at the local and regional level. Agriculture and municipalities are reliant on western watersheds to survive, so the impacts of future hydrologic changes could be significant.
“There is very limited research going on that tells us how vegetation type and structure influences hydrology in an ecosystem, but we do know disturbances change the hydrocycle and the ecosystem itself,” Ilangakoon said. “It also changes the soil carbon, habitat quality – really everything – so assessing vegetation is critical.”
Reynolds Creek experimental watershed in southwest Idaho shows a range of plant functional types with varying density and structure. The study area also shows a gradient of topography (right), which controls both vegetation and hydrosystems.
There is a silver lining: Ilangakoon recently was selected as one of 69 graduate students (out of a pool of 385 nationally) to be awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship for her proposal to analyze data collected in the Owyhee mountains and Colorado’s Grand Mesa using a full-wave ...

Read More