Dom Ciruzzi

Education

• Ph.D., Geological Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• M.S., Geological Sciences, University at Buffalo
• B.A., Geophysics, SUNY Geneseo

Research Interests

Much of the water cycle is invisible, hidden in the interactions among groundwater, soil, vegetation, and the atmosphere that govern how landscapes store and release water. My ecohydrology research quantifies the two-way exchange between water and ecosystems, and I work to resolve how water availability shapes plant function and how plants, in turn, regulate the storage, movement, and return of water across the natural and built environment. Trees are central to my work, both because they can be used as hydrological sensors and because their water use governs important processes such as ecosystem productivity, urban microclimate, and landscape-scale water balances. Often, my work interprets connections between subsurface water and forest hydrological processes by measuring various environmental proxies, such as the growth signal encoded in tree rings, the natural sway frequencies of trees, or the evapotranspiration flux captured in a satellite pixel. I work across forests, cities, and coastal landscapes, and integrate field instrumentation, numerical modeling, and remote sensing to disentangle water-vegetation interactions. These efforts aim to anticipate how water, forests, and the communities that depend on them will respond to a changing climate and changing land uses. I am also interested in teaching-as-research and have worked to characterize undergraduate hydrology education, and am working on projects to develop new approaches to teaching hidden Earth and environmental science processes.

Projects

• Mapping groundwater-forest interactions in a changing climate
• Monitoring tree sway as an indicator of ecohydrological processes
• Water-tree interactions in urban environments
• Ecohydrology remote sensing (NASA SARP)
• Scholarship of hydrology education

Selected Publications

Courses