Anne’s top papers of 2016 + 3 she co-wrote

Yesterday, I posted an epic analysis of my scientific reading habits in 2016, but I didn’t tell you about the papers I read last year that made my heart sing. And I didn’t take much time to brag about my own contributions to the scientific literature. So I’m going to rectify that omission today.

My top 3 papers of 2016 are (in no particular order):

Of rocks and social justice. (unsigned editorial) Nature Geoscience 9, 797 (2016) doi:10.1038/ngeo2836

The whole thing is absolutely worth reading (and it’s not behind a paywall) but here’s where it really starts to hit home:

Two main challenges stand in the way of achieving a diverse geoscience workforce representative of society: we need to attract more people who have not been wearing checkered shirts, walking boots and rucksacks since secondary school, and we need to retain them.

Waters, C. N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., Barnosky, A. D., Poirier, C., Ga?uszka, A., … & Jeandel, C. (2016). The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. Science, 351(6269), aad2622.

Want an up-to-date, data-rich, and condensed summary of why many scientists think it is time for a new geologic epoch? This is the paper to read.

Wu, Q., Zhao, Z., Liu, L., Granger, D. E., Wang, H., Cohen, D. J., … & Zhang, J. (2016). Outburst flood at 1920 BCE supports historicity of China’s Great Flood and the Xia dynasty. Science, 353(6299), 579-582.

I am a sucker for a good mega-paleo-flood story, and this one ticks all of the right boxes. An earthquake generates a landslide, which dams a river, and then fails, resulting in one of the largest floods of the last 10,000 years and alters the course of Chinese history. Geology, archaeology, and history combine in this compelling story.

Plus, a bonus paper, that was definitely one of the best papers I read in 2016.

Shields, C., and C. Tague (2015), Ecohydrology in semiarid urban ecosystems: Modeling the relationship between connected impervious area and ecosystem productivity, Water Resour. Res., 51, 302–319, doi:10.1002/2014WR016108.

I’m cheating a little bit here, because this paper came out in 2015. But I read this paper in 2015, and then I read it twice more in 2016. That’s how much I like it. Why? Because it’s a really nice illustration of how physically-based models can reveal the complex and unexpected ways that ecosystems and watersheds respond to urban environments. In a semi-arid environment, deep rooted vegetation can take advantage of the bonus water that gets delivered from rooftop downspouts that drain out onto the land. The additional water use boosts net primary productivity, potentially enough to offset the loss of productivity that occurred when parts of the landscape were paved and built upon. But while deep rooted vegetation, native to the semi-arid landscape, can take advantage of the bonus water, grass can’t. It’s a cool story, with implications for the way we develop and manage urban landscapes – and the way we model them. (This paper is open access as of January 1, 2017!)

I was thrilled to be able to contribute to 3 papers in 2016. 

Turner, V.K., Jarden, K.M., and Jefferson, A.J., 2016. Resident perspectives on green infrastructure in an experimental suburban stormwater management program. Cities and the Environment, 9(1): art. 4.

In 2015, my team published a paper showing how the installation of bioretention cells, rain gardens, and rain barrels on a residential street in the Cleveland area substantially decreased stormwater runoff. This paper represents the other side of the story – the side that is, just as important (if not more so) – how the people on the street responded to the addition of this green infrastructure. In short, getting residents on board with stormwater management is a big challenge that we’re going to face as we scale-up from demonstration projects to widespread deployment of these technologies. (This paper is open access and free to all.)

Bell, C.D., McMillan, S.K., Clinton, S.M., and Jefferson, A.J., 2016. Hydrologic response to stormwater control measures in urban watersheds. Journal of Hydrology. Online ahead of print. doi: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.08.049.

Bell, C.D., McMillan, S.K., Clinton, S.M., and Jefferson, A.J., 2016. Characterizing the Effects of Stormwater Mitigation on Nutrient Export and Stream Concentrations. Environmental Management. doi:10.1007/s00267-016-0801-4

I’m thrilled that first author Colin Bell completed his doctorate in 2016 and got two papers out to boot. These papers are the culmination of 5 years of research in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the Journal of Hydrology, we try to disentangle the effects of stormwater management from the overall signal of urbanization across 16 watersheds. It turns out that for the level of stormwater management we see in the real world, it’s not enough to counter-act the effects of impervious surfaces (pavement and rooftops) as a driver of the hydrologic behavior of urban streams. In Environmental Management, we aim to understand the influence of stormwater ponds and wetlands on water quality in the receiving streams. This turns out to be quite tricky, because the placement of stormwater management structures spatially correlates with changes in land use, but based on differences in concentration between stormwater structure outflow and the stream, we show that it should be possible. This echoes the findings from our 2015 paper using water isotopes to understand stormwater management influences at one of the same sites. Colin will have another paper or two coming out of his modeling work in the next year or so, and we’re still analyzing more data from this project, so keep your eyes out for more work along these lines.