Alexandra “Alex” Konings is transforming the broad field of global ecology. Her work has focused on the coupling between ecosystem carbon and water fluxes, which are critical for managing water resources and wildfire risks, estimating ecosystem carbon storage and climate feedback, and many other applications. Her methodological innovations include developing a new method for assessing plant water stress, called vegetation optical depth (VOD), which leverages microwave satellites originally designed to measure soil moisture. Through a dedicated field campaign and post hoc analyses, she showed that remotely estimated VOD is closely related to leaf water potential, thus revealing an entirely new way to study a key plant trait that had gone largely unmeasured. She then introduced the use of diurnal variations in microwave vegetation indices to isolate leaf water potential changes, which can be used to study forest growth dynamics and tree mortality. She also showed how VOD can be used to map live fuel moisture content and wildfire risk.

Based on these innovate approaches, Alex and her students have generated many important scientific insights, including showing that (1) an ecosystem’s diversity of plant hydraulic traits plays a critical role in shaping its drought resilience, (2) contrary to conventional expectations, evapotranspiration (ET) increases rather than decreases during almost half of droughts across the globe, (3) plant water use has a significant influence on burned-area dynamics and ignition risk, (4) the impact of successive droughts is often far more damaging than a single drought, and (5) areas in the western United States that are experiencing rapid population growth are also experiencing rapid increases in wildfire risk.

In addition to her prodigious research output, Alex has demonstrated a clear commitment to serving the scientific community, including as an associate editor of multiple journals, a convener of workshops on “Sensing Forest Water Dynamics from Space,” a member of the National Research Council Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space, a recipient of AGU Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Refereeing, and an active teacher and mentor at her university.

Alex’s work has redefined our understanding of the importance of plant-water management strategies for carbon and water cycling. She is a pioneer in both a relatively new line of scientific study and in the use of Earth observations to improve scientific understanding of the biosphere in the Earth system and its response to global change.

—David Lobell
Stanford University
Stanford, California