Daniella Rempe
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
When a drought ends, the rain comes back faster than the forest does. Trees may keep growing slowly and streams may stay low for years afterward.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
root zone
deep moisture storage
weathered bedrock
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2029
What they work on
- Test whether slow refilling of deep subsurface moisture, rather than lasting tree physiological damage, explains why forest growth and streamflow stay suppressed after drought ends, using a multiyear deep-moisture record spanning before, during, and after a drought.
- Determine when tree-ring records register drought legacies, by comparing newly collected tree-ring widths at monitored sites with public tree-ring chronologies paired with satellite-derived water balance data.
- Measure root-zone water storage beneath soil and into weathered bedrock across hydrologic monitoring sites in Texas, California, and Colorado to capture how storage responds to climate variability.
- Use these ground-based storage measurements to advance satellite-based methods for estimating root-zone moisture over large areas.
- Evaluate with an ecohydrologic model how root-zone moisture storage responds to drought, reduced snowpack, and land-use disturbance in upland forests that recharge aquifers and feed rivers.
More about the research
A likely reason is hidden from most measurements: tree roots do not just drink from the top layer of soil. They reach meters down, often into weathered bedrock, and the water held there can take a long time to refill. Because almost all moisture sensors are shallow, the amount of water stored in this deep root zone is one of the least measured quantities in the entire water cycle, which makes forecasts of water supply, streamflow, and forest health unreliable. Work in this lab centers on measuring that deep moisture directly and on using it to explain how forests and rivers respond to swings in climate.
Why it matters
Water managers and forest managers both plan around how much water will reach streams and trees after dry years, and both are currently working with almost no data on the deep moisture that controls it. Better measurements and satellite methods could sharpen water-supply forecasts for cities and agriculture in Texas, California, and Colorado, inform forest thinning and post-drought management decisions, and reduce uncertainty in projections of how upland forests and groundwater recharge will fare under a changing climate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hoori Ajami
University of California-Riverside, CA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Measure water balance dynamics, water residence times and bedrock groundwater's contribution to streams in the Kaweah River watershed using hydrometric observations and hydrochemical tracers.
Karen King
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Use quantitative wood anatomy, measurements of individual wood cells in tree rings, to build high-resolution temperature and precipitation records over the last millennium across temperate North America.
Sharon Billings
University of Kansas, KS·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine when and how strongly bedrock, compared with plant roots, controls water and carbon movement between land and atmosphere, using new field data and existing Critical Zone, NEON and LTER datasets.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
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