Ashley Matheny was recently awarded 2nd Place Oral Presentation at the 32nd Conference on Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, hosted by the American Meteorological Society in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Environmental Engineering doctoral student and Ohio State Presidential Fellow's presentation, "Shifting the plant functional type paradigm to reflect hydraulic properties may improve model resolution of drought and disturbance", explains how scientists and engineers can use advanced understanding of how vegetation hydraulically regulates the dynamics of transpiration at short and long time scales, to build land-surface models that are better able to capture how water and carbon cycles are affected by droughts and other forest disturbances.
Ashley Matheny climbs a maple tree to install a stem water content sensor.
A native of Vienna, West Virginia, Ashley will receive her Ph.D. during summer commencement on August 7th. After graduation, she will remain at Ohio State where she will serve as a post doctoral researcher in the Ecohydrometeorology Lab of Associate Professor Gil Bohrer. Funded by an NSF Hydrological Sciences grant awarded to Bohrer and Matheny in the spring of 2016, Ashley will continue her field research while she works to couple the vegetation hydrodynamics module with the Community Land Model (CLM) - a part of the Community Earth Systems Model (CESM) that is broadly used by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the prediction of climate change.
Ashley’s passion for engineering is evident. “I combine math, physics and creativity to solve challenging, real-world problems” she states.
A view of the Michigan forest from atop the research team
