THE 2023 TISON AWARD GOES TO GUNTHER LIEBHARD (AUSTRIA)
Gunther Liebhard, Andreas Klik, Christine Stumpp & Reinhard Nolz (2022) Partitioning evapotranspiration using water stable isotopes and information from lysimeter experiments, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 67:4, 646-661, DOI: 10.1080/02626667.2022.2030866
Citation from Stacey Archfield, Co-Editor of Hydrological Sciences Journal on behalf of the Jury of the 2023 Tison Award.
Left to right: Gunther Liebhard and Stacey Archfield (Co-Editor HSJ)
The Tison Award for the year 2023 goes to Dr. Gunther Liebhard Department of the Water, Atmosphere and Environment, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, for the paper titled, “Partitioning evapotranspiration using water stable isotopes and information from lysimeter experiments” published in Hydrological Sciences Journal in 2021. The paper was co-authored by Gunther’s colleagues, Associate Professor Andreas Kilk, Professor Christine Stumpp, and Dr. Reinhard Nolz, also at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Austria, who were not eligible for the Tison Award, age-wise.
The voting panel especially noted that this paper provides a novel and highly promising experimental field approach that addresses the partitioning of evapotranspiration, which is an extraordinarily difficult process to disentangle and quantify. The authors adapted a laboratory-based methodology and applied it to field conditions, which allowed for the quantification of evaporation and transpiration rates for the entire vegetation period of a commodity plant. In addition to contributing to the critical importance of understanding water availability for crop production, this work also represents an advancement in improving model evaluation and verification of the evapotranspiration process. For these reasons, the jury members believe the paper has the potential to make a substantial and broad contribution to hydrologic sciences.
Although there was strong competition amongst the 15 nominated papers in the 2023 Tison Award process, the awarded paper received strong support and emerged as the clear winner. To date, there have already been over 9,930 views of the paper and 10 citations in the literature. In congratulating the authors, we wish for Dr. Liebhard further scientific success and hope that the Tison Award received from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences will serve as a springboard to achieve new heights in their scientific career.
Response from Gunther Liebhard
Thank you Dr. Archfield for the nice citation and thank you Dr. Archfield, Prof. Cudennec and all the other members of the jury under the chair Prof. Fiori for giving me the honor to receive this award. As this publication was my first ever publication, I was already very happy that it was accepted in such a great journal – this award is now even more of an honor for me. The goal of our work was to develop a method to measure the proportion of unproductive and productive water use directly in the field. This should provide a data basis for decision support to manage the available water resources as well as agricultural soils in a careful and sustainable way.
In connection with this, I would like to thank my coauthors, who were also my supervisors, especially Reinhard Nolz. Thank you for the great supervision and the joint work on the publication and for giving me the opportunity to work on such questions and in this meaningful field.