News Archive

Research led by PhD student Bryn Morgan reveals that grasslands use water aggressively until it's gone, while forests cut back early to avoid disaster.

PhD student Ryoko Araki developed a nonlinear model that captures how plants dynamically respond to water stress—revealing whether ecosystems are water spenders or water savers.

A global effort mapped groundwater-dependent ecosystems for the first time, finding that 53% are in areas with known groundwater depletion and only 21% are protected.

Research led by PhD student Anna Boser suggests that variation in farming practices could save as much water as switching crops or fallowing fields in California's Central Valley.

PhD student Cascade Tuholske led research mapping nitrogen inputs from human wastewater across 130,000 watersheds worldwide—the first global study at this resolution.

Research led by PhD student Cascade Tuholske found that extreme heat exposure in urban areas increased 200% globally over 34 years, with nearly two billion people affected.

WAVES lab students win awards to support dissertation research, science communication, and outreach.

NSF WSC grant culminates in deployment of ca. 60 Arable Marks and social surveys involving several universities in Kenya's Mount Kenya region

Ryan is working as a Researcher at Clark Labs to develop the scalable machine learning component of an active learning system to detect smallholder agriculture

The WAVES Lab has two postdoctoral research associate positions available starting in the fall of 2018.

Dr. Kwaw Andam, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institutes's Ghana Strategy Support Program in Accra visited our lab at UCSB to collaborate on an urban food security research project.

The WAVES lab is part of two newly-funded projects focused on climate change and conservation of riparian forests in mediterranean drylands. The projects are led by Michael Singer, and also involve collaborators Dar Roberts At UCSB and John Stella at SUNY-ESF.

Cascade Tuholske contributed to urbanization and urban food security sections in FAO's 2017 State of Food and Agriculture Report.

Water Sustainability Climate work wraps up with close to 60 Arable Marks deployed in Zambia's southern province.

Cascade was named a Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security to examine urban food security in Accra, Ghana and Lusaka, Zambia.

Cynthia has been selected as one of nine new fellows out of 949 applications to serve three-year appointments as postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors, beginning this fall.

Natasha was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Kenya to continue research on smallholder agriculture around Mount Kenya.

A new article was published in [Environmental Research Letters](http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-9326) by researchers from the CaylorLab, the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center.

Mount Kenya is one of the major water towers in Kenya, but with an increase in population and water demand, the pressure on this scare commodity has been on the rise.

Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi just got awarded the Mary and Randall Hack ‘69 Graduate Award by the Princeton Environmental Institute

This summer Drew Gower traveled to Kenya for a three-week mission wrapping up one project and launching another.

Adam Wolf from the Caylor Lab, along with researchers at Princeton University and other institutions, just published a new article in Science

Researchers from the Caylor Lab and the University of Indiana's Ostrom Workshop worked with Textit, a company that builds SMS and voice applications, to design a crop failure early warning system for use among African smallholders.

Former lab member Stephen Good just published an article in Science

Marcus Spiegel's project, _Modeling Agricultural Expansion in Zambia to Predict and Minimize Tradeoffs_ has been selected for support from the Smith-Newton Scholars Program in the Princeton Environmental Institute

Lyndon Estes is the co-lead author on a paper that was recently published in <em>Nature Climate Change</em> and is currently highlighted on the front page of the journal.

Kaiyu Guan, Kelly Caylor, and Adam Wolf recently published an article in Nature Geoscience and the article is currently on the front page of the journal's website.

Kelly and a group of scientists from Princeton University recently published a paper in Science on the influence of termite mounds in dryland ecosystems.

We recently published a paper in Biogeosciences.

We recently published a paper in <em>Geophysical Research Letters</em> that investigates the relationship between the ratio of transpiration over evapotranspiration (T/ET) and leaf area index (LAI).

This summer, Hilary and her intern Kathy joined Drew and Keita in Laikipia, Kenya to collect data on plant physiological response to water stress.

This summer, Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi and her intern Craig Sinkler spent the summer in the lab in Princeton to conduct an experiment looking at foliar water uptake.

Drew Gower just received a Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowship for Graduate Environmental Study awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

We recently published a paper in _Environmental Research Letters_ that examines changes in the water available for growing maize in sub-Saharan Africa between 1979 and 2010.

Stephanie Debats just got awarded the Mary and Randall Hack ‘69 Graduate Award by the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Group members went out to California in June to install sensors in agricultural fields with the goal of realtime monitoring of crop growth and microclimate in control, water limited, and N-limited corn fields.

We are very happy to have been awarded new grants from both NSF and NASA!

Stephanie Debats and Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi both received awards from the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Cynthia Gerlein just received NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF).

Elliot Chang</a>'s project, _The Use of Alginate and Chitosan to Purify Leaf Distillates of Organic Contaminants_ has been selected for support from the Smith-Newton Scholars Program in the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Global change research in the fields of ecology and conservation biology primarily focuses on how changing climatic variables will directly impact species and ecosystems.

Stephanie Debats and Drew Gower attended a modeling workshop series through SESYNC in Annapolis, Maryland.

Adam presented a talk to Strata NYC last week.

We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Thomas Fuchs from the Jet Propulsion Lab on October 2nd and 3rd.

We are very proud that we were recently awarded two separate 1-year awards from the Jet Propulsion Lab's Strategic University Research Partnership program!

"Climate change must not blow conservation off course", by Morgan Tingley, Lyndon, and David Wilcove was published in the comment section of this week's _Nature_.

"Projected climate impacts to South African maize and wheat production in 2055: A comparison of empirical and mechanistic modeling approaches", written by Lyndon and co-authored by Stephanie, has been accepted by Global Change Biology.

What are the members of the lab up to this summer?

Stephanie was just awarded a PEI-STEP fellowship!

An article, "Ecosystem-scale spatial heterogeneity of stable isotopes of soil nitrogen in African savannas", written by Lixin Wang has been published in Landscape Ecology.

An article written by Lixin Wang has been published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

Our 2nd COSMOS probe is now operational at our flux tower site located at the Mpala Research Center in central Kenya.

Our first of two COSMOS probes (and the first probe deployed in Africa) is now operational at our flux tower site located at the Mpala Research Center in central Kenya.

Last month Stephanie, Diana, and Molly were in Zambia deploying a suite of rain gauges and soil moisture probes as part of our NSF-funded collaboration on climate, resilience, and food security with Tom Evans at Indiana University and the Zambia Agricultural Research Institute.

From June through August 2011 the Caylor Lab in Kenya hosted three undergraduate interns from the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Grand Challenges Internship Program

Kelly is a co-convener for four sessions at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, CA.

Our research and teaching in Kenya is affiliated with the Princeton Grand Challenges Program. A summary of that work is now presented on the Grand Challenges web page.

Graduating CEE major and long-time group member Molly O’Connor has been awarded the 2011 Christine Traml Prize.

Our NSF-funded ecohydrological observatory is now up an running at the Mpala Research Center in central Kenya.

During Sep 18-Oct 29, 2008, Lixin Wang stayed at Biosphere 2 (University of Arizona) to collaborate with Juan Villegas, Travis Huxman and David Breshears in their project to see how vegetation cover determines relative contribution of transpiration and evapotranspiration to total evapotranspiration.

Kelly is on the program committee at the upcoming AGU Chapman Conference in Ecohydrology.

Trenton has received the Outstanding Student Paper Award,for his presentation at the 2008 Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Lixin will present a talk titled “Integrating hydrology and biogeochemistry in drylands: the Kalahari Transect as a model ecosystem” at the EGU general assembly meeting on Monday the 20th of April, 2009.

An article authored by Kelly, Todd Scanlon at the University of Virginia, and Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe (Princeton University) has just been published in Water Resources Research.

An article authored by Lixin Wang is appearing in the most recent issue of Geoderma.

Alex will present a talk about his research for the brown bag series in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Two articles by our group on sap velocity measurements have been published in the March 2009 issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

Lixin will present a brown bag seminar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The Ecohydrology lab group was pleased to host David Robinson for a visit to Princeton University.

Ph.D. student Trenton Franz has begun a new experiment to investigate the potential of sub-surface gravity driven mounds to contribute to hillslope water balance in sites with many macropores and a high degree of soil bioturbation.

Our group’s first manuscript using the LGR Water Vapor Isotope Analyzer has been accepted for publication in the journal 'Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry'.

Our group gave three presentations at this fall’s AGU meeting.

Kelly was invited to give a talk at the 2008 SSSA Meeting in Houston, TX.

The newest member of our group is Stephen Good, who is beginning work on a Ph.D.

Members of our group gave two presentations at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Milwaukee, WI.

Trenton Franz, a fourth-year graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, studies hydrology through the Ewaso Water Project, the field research component of the Water, Savannas and Society Project.

During July 5-Sep 5, 2008, Lixin Wang worked at Morgan-Monroe State Forest Ameriflux tower site.

Trenton Franz and Alex Lester put together a series of photos and display text as part of a new art exhibit that is now on display in the E-quad café.

Two (i.e. both) members of the former ecohydrology group at Indiana University presented their Masters thesis research at the 2008 AAG meeting in Boston, MA.

![Conference Logo](){: .align-left} Kelly will serve as the moderator of a panel discussion on “Eco-friendly Development” in Africa and the tradeoffs that exist between development and conservation in many African nations. <!--more-->The discussion is part of the two-day Princeton Colloquium on Pub...

The first presentation ever given by one of our group’s students occurred at this fall’s AGU Meeting!

The December 2007 issue of JGR-Biogeosciences contains an article that Kelly co-authored with Paolo D’Odorico, Greg Okin, and Todd Scanlon.

This week’s issue of Nature magazine contains an article authored by Todd Scanlon, Kelly, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe and Simon Levin.

An article Kelly co-authored with Christelle Hély and others was published on-line in the journal Ecosystems today.

Along with Greg Okin (UCLA, Department of Geography), Paolo D’Odorico (UVA, Department of Environmental Sciences), Natalie Mladenov (University of Colorado, Bolder), we have just been awarded a grant from NSF’s Division of Ecological Biology.

Julianno Sambatti and Kelly published an article in New Phytologist.

Group members Trenton Franz, Alex Lester, and Lizzie King are off on a 3 week field campaign to install runoff experiment at Koija Group Ranch.

![Mt. Kenya](){: .align-left} Trenton Franz and Kelly Caylor are spending 2 weeks field campaign to central Kenyan highlands. <!--more-->The trip is a sort of "fact-finding" expedition, since neither Kelly or Trenton have been to Kenya before. We will be hosted by the Mpala Research Center, which i...