Fluid mechanics might seem like an abstract topic to some, but it has real-world applications in wine grape production. Guests Walt and Eric provide advice on how to produce meaningful collaborative flux research and share outcomes with growers. They also highlight how factors like wind speed and direction alter disease dynamics, contributing to issues like antibiotic resistance in nearby fields.
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In this episode of Meet the Fluxers, we learn valuable insights into successful scientific collaboration and stakeholder engagement through the experiences of Walt and Eric, who have been working together since 2008. Their partnership exemplifies how crossing disciplinary boundaries (biology and engineering) can lead to innovative research and lasting professional relationships. The discussion emphasizes several key lessons: the importance of treating stakeholders (especially farmers) as knowledgeable peers, communicating effectively about uncertainty and risk, being adaptable when conducting field research, and understanding that successful collaboration depends as much on personal compatibility as technical expertise. They also highlight how their work in flux science and pathogen dispersion has broad applications, from agriculture to national security, and stress that the most productive scientific partnerships often develop from genuine friendships rather than just professional connections. Their experience demonstrates that stepping out of one's academic "silo" and embracing cross-disciplinary collaboration can transform both research outcomes and careers.
Transcript
Jason: How did the two of you meet and start collaborating?
Walt: One day I looked at my email and there was a note from Rob Stoll. [He] was a brand-new professor at the University of Utah and he was collaborating with Eric. He had read one of our papers on pathogen dispersion and was wondering if we would be interested in collaborating with him. After reading the ideas he had, I was ecstatic. It's what I had been looking for, for the last five or six years trying to understand what area air samplers represented in an agricultural field. That was 2008, Eric?
Eric: Yeah, I was going to say 2008 or 2009. Exactly what you said, we were coming from the other background. Walt, of course, is on more of the biology side and we're more on the engineering side. Rob was this brand-new faculty and I was trying to give him advice on how to make measurements and I hadn't made agricultural measurements yet at the time. So, we were driving all around the state of Utah trying to get collaborators and couldn't find anybody. But it was Walt but that actually answered the call to collaborate with somebody that was quite different than himself. I think that's one of the key things: being able to go out on a limb and try to collaborate with somebody that's way out of your field. And, Walt was willing to do that for sure.
Walt: Eric and Rob were also quite interested in joining the darker side of biology and all the uncertainty that's in that. It kind of made turbulence look easy. We just clicked. I don't know how else to say it. It was just…we thought very similar. So, we all started working together, and 15 years later we're still working together.
Eric: Yeah, it's amazing. I think, in terms of collaboration, finding people that…kind of…are able to work together is the key piece. It's mostly a personal relationship thing. Everybody's got technical skills, but can you tolerate the other people on the other side?
Walt: I would say y'all are because y'all spent a lot of time learning a lot of biology that some other engineers that I've tried to collaborate with haven't been interested in, trying to understand the biological systems. It's that interface between the engineering and the biology that I think is the most interesting.
Eric: Jason, you also commented on stakeholders. My original background…I actually did a lot of work in urban fluid mechanics, making flux measurements in urban areas. That has one whole type of stakeholder that is related to urban planners, people who are in cities. The stakeholders associated with agriculture are totally different. Working with those folks is very unique, and Walt is amazing at this. You really need to be able to have the right kind of communication to be able to get the experiments done that you want to have done. You can't just…kind of…roll into town and say, “yeah, we're going to make these measurements”. You have to have an approach of really understanding what, in this case, growers particularly have the need for. Walt’s extension background has been really educational for me. The way you approach working with growers is pretty unique.
Walt: A large part of the research program that I have is actually directed toward developing decision aids for growers to help them manage diseases. Part of that, I'd probably say about 80% of our research trials, have to be done at scale in grower’s fields to actually test these different concepts. Well to do that, you have to learn a lot about how they manage and how they think and then spend years building trust with them so that they're willing to take these risks.
Some of the vineyards that Eric and I have worked in, convincing them to let us put hundreds of thousands of dollars of instruments up in a vineyard that has $10-12, 000 per ton grapes in it is not an easy task. Some of these towers are rather obtrusive to the equipment they're trying to move through. Getting this done, it’s a lot of conversations over the winter. But it also helps when you have partners that work with you that have learned some of the language and can listen to the grower and accommodate their concerns in helping you design the experiment, and where and how you're going to place equipment into these working fields.
Eric: Developing that relationship and the trust is huge with working with stakeholders. The other thing that I found in that same process is, a lot of times, they know the unknown unknowns. There are so many things in the field that you think you know, and you walk in, and if you listen to the stakeholder, you walk out with your next proposal, basically, because you were missing so many of those basic ideas.
Walt: Then you have stakeholders like the Westmount vineyard owner who actually has a BS in physics. That's why some of the vineyards are named Zigzag and Entropy. Particularly working in the wine industry, you never know the education that an individual is going to have that owns this. You have to walk into that environment treating them as peers. For a farmer to still be in business in today's day and age, they have to be wicked smart in multiple areas just to keep the farm afloat. I've seen that many times with researchers coming in and assuming they might have a little bit more on the farmer and getting rapidly surprised that sometimes the farmer has already read some of their papers and understands them. That's where Eric and Rob made these interactions quite simple. They always just came into the field and interacted with the growers as if they were talking to a colleague. [They] changed the vocabulary, but not the subject matter or how they interacted with the individual. It was always very much this give and take.
Note: Westmount Wine Co. co-founder and executive winemaker, Laurent Montalieu, was a student of agricultural engineering in Bordeaux, France.
Eric: Yeah, definitely. When you're working either with stakeholders or collaborating with somebody in a different field, vocabulary is often the biggest problem. And sometimes…I mean…it takes some patience. This is something that you've been talking about for the last three decades, and somebody comes in and says…doesn't even pronounce the name of whatever it is you're studying correctly and has all kinds of difficulties working with just the vocabulary. It's an exercise in patience, but usually it's worth it.
Walt: And learning who takes the final edit on which grant so that it meets the style for the right program.
Eric: Yeah, and being willing to let go on certain views, there.
Jason: Do you have specific advice that you think really helps early career scientists and the new researchers that you work with start to learn the skills and confidence in working with stakeholders?
Walt: The one thing that really comes to mind is recognizing, they are going to be incredibly broad and their knowledge base and you're going to be incredibly deep and narrow in yours. Figuring out how to communicate across the breadth that growers work on and recognizing that time is the absolute most precious commodity that any of us have; coming into the conversations with them already having a path mapped out that you can clearly present that doesn't waste their time.
Eric: That's really, really good. You have the path and the approach. So, you're listening and putting the stakeholder on equal footing and you're not wasting their time. It doesn't even matter whether it's, you know, a grower or it's somebody that's part of a city or a government organization that you're working with. Nobody has time to talk to us. They're doing this out of the goodness of their heart with the likelihood of the benefit to them being small. Hopefully it's bigger, and the nice thing about agriculture [is] there is the potential that they could make a change to how they're doing management. And there's a potential that it's a benefit, but there's probably a lot of cases where it's not going to be a benefit.
Walt: We go into our field research planning at the beginning a 50% attrition rate. Fifty percent of the experiments that we lay out in any one year, we expect to lose for one reason or another. It could be a tractor broke down and the treatment that we were wanting to get out doesn't get out. It could be that three of the other assistant managers quit and [the] manager lost track of where they were for what we were doing. There's a multitude of things that can come into play, and you keep working with the grower. They are trying to give you their best. You will find over years who is the most reliable and you'll shift around a bit at times. But ultimately, if you understand that going in, and you just take the losses as they come, you'll be a lot better off in terms of your own research and your ability to cope with it. Something else you always have to remember is, we jokingly say, tractor blight is a real disease in our work because equipment gets hit. It's just part of what happens and you have to be prepared for it and you just accept it as the cost of doing business and move on.
Jason: Can you both talk a little bit about what you think flux science can do for society, or for agriculture, or for some of these bigger problems that society can recognize as important?
Eric: As somebody who studies boundary layer meteorology, to me, flux is everything. We're talking about the interface between the surface of the Earth and the atmosphere where we all live and all of our products are produced and people recreate. There [are] so many different aspects of weather. It's…when we talk about a flux, we're talking about some quantity moving across an area per unit time. Whatever that is, whether it's a pollutant, whether it's momentum, heat, or moisture…All of these things fundamentally govern a huge fraction of what we do in our daily lives. From the agricultural point of view, Walt has, and I as well, interest that covers a wide range of uses, whether it's trying to determine climate change, methane fluxes, or whether we're talking about in an urban area, specifically pollutants, that are being generated and moved around. When people think about fluxes, we can't just think about fluxes as a vertical flux from horizontal surface. Those don't exist in the real world. I mean, maybe somewhere they do, but it's much more complicated than that. We need to be thinking about fluxes from a full 3D perspective depending on the application that's at hand.
Walt: I think what excites me the most, or where I think flux can go, is increasing our understanding of the uncertainties and the probabilities of pathogen development or disease development in agronomic systems. Because right now, I think we have a very unnuanced understanding of disease dynamics. Because we tend to look at disease development aggregated over very long time periods. Working with Eric has taught me how dynamic pathogen movement really is and how discrete of an event that it is. And then understanding that particular event: how the plume moves, where it moves, and what that means to regional cooperation in terms of disease management. Now, with fungicide resistance becoming more and more prevalent within a lot of our pathogen populations, how do we take a regional perspective in terms of managing that? [A] pathogen doesn't respect a fence line. It's going to move back and forth across it despite what the growers are doing. When we first found Qoi (Quinone ‘outer’ inhibitor) resistance in grape powdery mildew, one of the things that we noticed at this vineyard was they had an excellent management program. But, when we talked to the eight growers that were adjacent to this property, we realized that a fungicide was used every single week across all eight vineyards for four months, almost. In essence, on the scale of the grower, they were doing everything they could, but at the scale of the hillside where this vineyard was located, they weren't rotating at all, and resistance rapidly was developing in this area. Bringing that ability to give this type of regional forecast, and risk analysis, that helps growers make better decisions in conjunction with their neighbors.
Eric: When you think about fluxes, normally, we're thinking about this vertical flux from some idealized surface, but what Walt just described involved an emission, a deposition, a horizontally-dominated flux versus a vertically-dominated flux… And so, the idealized way we think about making eddy covariance measurements, which takes this really big complicated transport equation and distills it down to two little terms is an oversimplification. Walt just gave you a great example [of] why we have to think about it in a really different way.
Jason: I'm curious for both of you, how you see intersector benefits to flux science and where flux science fits into broader concerns for society. Do you see, in your professional work, cross-sector interest and applicability to the work that you do? Or is that an uphill battle in terms of trying to find funding and support and communication between sectors?
Walt: No. Both DOD people and DOE have contacted us about working with them in terms of understanding how to take a disease datapoint…it could be manual scouting; it could be an air sampler satellite image…and convert that to a risk analysis on a regional scale. DOE is very interested in this because of the movement of biofuels. DOD considers anything that risks food security, energy security as a threat and so they're always looking at doing that. They've had Eric and Rob and myself come and talk to them about it. The medical community is now interested in a lot of our work because of our ability to start predicting movement of pathogens to and from urban environments within agronomic fields. So, are agronomic fields a source of what we call azole resistance in a clinical setting? Or is this only originating from urban areas?
Eric: I would agree with Walt. There's a pretty broad understanding that these problems need to be addressed more widely. There’s quite a bit of awareness of this. Even with, like, things like wildfire, and dispersion associated with wildfire is other example, that where generally, there's a pretty good understanding that approaches that we are talking about with flux measurements need to be integrated as well.
Walt: Well, not just from a human health perspective, but also from a food quality or food tastiness perspective.
Jason: Do you see, for a lot of early career scientists, a mismatch in how we focus our energy on fundamental research and how we decide to do experiments and plan our work and look for funding for things that are popular and how you mesh that with the real concerns that society comes up with, which don't come from that same fundamental science perspective?
Walt: I have to kind of laugh at that question because my masters’ major professor used to always say, “anybody that tells you they do fundamental research lacks imagination”. He was adamant that all research is applied, it's just a of how and when. And that's been an approach I have taken my whole career. I've never focused on the field that I work in and always focused on what's the problem I'm trying to solve? Then be willing to either dive into a new area, or collect amazing colleagues that can bring flux measurements to bear when they sent me an email. One of the best decisions I made was replying to that email. But it's all about that openness and being willing to just adapt to what's opening up in front of you, and relearn at times.
Eric: I agree with Walt's advisor. Almost everything we're doing, at some level, is applied. It's not like we have a nail, and we're looking for a hammer. Generally, these things are not in a vacuum and we have an idea. If you have an idea that you're passionate about, that's a fundamental science idea, digging into very quickly, you're going to find that it's not in a vacuum and that there are a number of areas that could benefit from it. And maybe that's the idea: make sure that you keep your mind open about it because it may not be exactly in the field that you're searching, and it may be tangential to that. Take the time to look into the tangential ideas as well. You may be working on some idea, some theory that you're testing, and you think it's going to be in one area, but it's actually got benefits off to the side.
Walt: I’ve definitely seen that in the collaborations with you. Some of the things that I thought were more biology-based have definitely appeared to be far more based on the physics of turbulence.
Eric: I think anytime you collaborate with somebody who is in a field that's very different, normally, we all come at things from those different perspectives, you know. “Oh no, it's a biological solution.” “No, no, it's a fluid mechanics solution”. In fact, it is probably some mixture of the two. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Walt: Developing the collaborations far afield takes the blinders off. I feel like it really has helped me open up my mind to even more solutions in terms of computation as well as understanding and being willing to do some work that I was like, “I don't see that really benefiting me much, but okay!” And I was wrong. It's been very beneficial.
Eric: Exactly what Walt just said, being open to these other ideas and the fact that your solution may not be the only solution, or it may be a part of a solution. There are other ideas out there that you should dig into. It sounds obvious. But it's not so easy. When you've been spending the last 10 years of your life studying this one little piece, it's not so easy.
Jason: I'm curious what you think about what's currently a big effort in the flux science community, which is developing regional, continental, and global networks. There are many different parts to that endeavor, including standardization of methods, networking amongst professionals, and looking at different applications. What directions do you see this global network of flux scientists going?
Eric: Just the fact that we have this, global network of observations is huge and it's fantastic. We've got all of this knowledge of how things are transported over a wide range of surfaces in a wide range of regions. But I think a lot of that's limited. People are always looking for “horizontal homogeneity” and “we need to make sure that our fluxes are constant with height”. I've made lots and lots of measurements, even designed to find that, and I've never seen a constant flux layer to speak of. Little windows, you can find those. [But] in terms of horizontal homogeneity, [my research group] conducted this test out in Utah's West Desert. It’s perfectly flat. Everything should be homogeneous, and we found fluxes that buried by factors of two and three across tens of meters. One of the challenges that we have going forward, we have this wonderful network and a network is typically one tower over one species for example, or one tower and one area. Certainly, that is valuable, but I think our understanding of the uncertainty in those particular measurements is pretty small. We have bounds on them, but I think we need to understand that uncertainty associated with the complexity of any real surface. There's such high spatial variability…And I understand that we do our best and that we need to move forward with these networks and adding additional measurements to be able to understand truly what the fluxes are from these different sites.
Walt: I think we have to continue expanding the networks, but we can't do so at the cost of coming in and getting these very unique sites particularly within agronomic systems. Within agronomic systems, I am also talking about forestry, because in a lot of ways that has become a managed agronomic system and we have to understand the very subtle nuances that terrain and canopy architecture bring to bear on how fluxes occur and how they carry particles. This can be smoke, pollution, pathogens, spray drift, insects. In the global marketplace that we continue to expand, we will always see pathogen and pest movement, and every time we have an introduction, the more that we understand about their dispersion, the better that we can respond and reduce the impact that they will have on both the natural and agronomic use code systems. Scale is everything and understanding the scale from the leaf, maybe even the sub-leaf, all the way up to the atmosphere and back. I didn't really appreciate how much things changed as you move through the different scales. Now, having done this 12-15 years, I think I might be getting to understand it a tad.
Jason: Do you see a benefit in growing networks in a way that includes people outside of the science community, incorporating the broad knowledge of farmers, of policymakers, of the people that we're working with and who might benefit from the science?
Walt: We're trying to do some of that right now with the QES (Quick Environmental Simulation) modeling environment that we've been working on since 2009. Eric came up with this idea of, “let's turn it into a game. Then, use it to see how individuals use different types of data to make decisions”. What we've been doing is taking QES and turning it into a digital twin for a vineyard, to where we have a 3-hectare vineyard that will run the disease epidemic, and we can start applying management decisions to it and see what happens in a year. And it gives us comparable results. The question there isn’t whether it's exactly right, it's whether the change is correct. Applying this or that treatment, we get the right response. And then by looking at how we do a succession of decisions, how does it change the overall response?
Eric: I think that one of the keys is the stakeholders, they've got decisions to make, and they want to have advice. Having some sort of a model or a tool that allows them to be able to play with different parameters and get an idea of reasonable outcomes is really important. When you're, if you're trying to kind of come up with a way to better integrate users or stakeholders into the…it's not necessarily advising them on something that's related to the details of the measurement, but it's asking them, you know, to go through, you know, a modeling exercise or scenario exercise where they're able to go and actually try different things and see what the results could be. Exactly like Walt said. Yeah, maybe the model's not perfect, but at least if it integrates the trends in the right way the stakeholder can have a much better idea what's going on and then bring their input into the process a lot more easily. Just talking about the details of the science is maybe a little bit too ambiguous, but having a scenario package that allows you to look at different scenarios and different outcomes is critical.
Walt: Two of the things you have to think about working with growers particularly is: Their decisions are largely intuitive. They're based on intuition because they have so much information that they have to integrate across so many different areas that a lot of it is…probably 99% of it is…all intuition based. But the other thing you have to remember with growers is, if they're asking you a question, you have to give them an answer because they have a decision to make based on the answer that you give them. What I recommend doing with that is say, “Well, I'm not sure, but this is what I know, this is what I don't know, and this is what I think”. They know how to partition that risk and use the information.
Eric: A lot of times, growers or any decision maker has some kind of heuristics that they go by. That's how you make decisions. Somehow or another, if we can provide them with a quick bit of information so that they can move and make their actual decisions, it's a lot more valuable. So, if it's in, like, an easy gaming environment, then that's great, or if it's somebody asking you a question and turning around with a quick answer, that's useful. That's also another approach.
Walt: Even if the answer has uncertainty in it, telling them what you're uncertain about, they'll accept it and they'll use it.
Jason: How do we talk about uncertainty? How do we communicate something without undermining the value of that knowledge?
Walt: Let's put that in the little different context. Often, we hear farmers are risk-averse. Every year, the farmer bets the farm that they can outwit Mother Nature. So, they go into the spring thinking that they can predict what's going to happen over the next six months or so. And the weather, the climate, and everything else, markets…and come out ahead. That's not risk-averse by any stretch of the imagination. They want to know probabilities. They want to know odds. They will figure out how to partition the risk. Once I learned to talk with growers in that language of odds and probabilities, it really changed how we interacted. They’ve become a lot more open to some of the crazy ideas that we were thinking about because they understood the risk, or they thought they did. And it turns out sometimes neither of us did.
Eric: Walt, you're running a social science experiment when you're doing that. How do they actually respond? Like, what kind of questions do you ask? Can you give an example?
Walt: Different growers have different acceptance of risk. The innovators, they're often a lot more open to risk. They took a risk earlier in their career and it worked out well for them. Now, they'll remember that one. They might not remember the five or six that failed. The typical corn farmer, they have two or three bad years, one great year, and they're just riding this and figuring out how to take that revenue from the good year and stretch it to cover the bad years. I think my first introduction into this was trying to convince growers to put a dollars’ worth of a bacterium on cottonseed. A dollar per acre is what the cost of it was. And the way the research group actually figured out to do it was to talk about the 10-year average return on investment. Any one year, we were all over the place. We could have a good year, bad year, in terms of whether that seed treatment worked. But on that 10-year average, we had a 10% yield return. That's not a bad deal for a dollar an acre investment. And so, it's looking at that in the time frames that they're thinking about. When working with wine grape growers, we are often talking to them about what would 5 more years out of this vineyard equal to you? It costs you $42,000 an acre to put in the ground and to get to harvesting. Instead of a 25-year lifespan, what would a 30-year lifespan be? Here's how we may be able to do it, what's that return on investment. The one thing they're always looking for is anything that will save them time. Their biggest constraint is time and when you talk with them and work with them with that understanding, they'll open up a lot to you.
Jason: Are there other practical things that scientists can use to do better science?
Eric: One of the other practical things that occurs is trying to put equipment into places. Be ahead of time, have a good plan, but anyone who's ever tried to install equipment knows that it's the hardest part. You sit and you have your Zoom meetings and you're in a room and you have location and a site. Everything's planned out on a map. Then you walk out into the field and you start talking to somebody, and all bets are off. All of a sudden, nothing goes as planned. For example, tractor blight, where the tractor comes in and takes out your tower. I have another colleague that happened to be in Baltimore who had instruments that were destroyed in the inner city. [There are] all kinds of things like that, that you have to deal with. As a new faculty being really, really, well aware that you have to have a whole bunch of contingencies for where your instruments are going to go and how they're going to be deployed but still meet the scientific goals that you're trying to achieve is really important.
Walt: It’s great to have a plan but you will have to adapt it.
Jason: Are there things that really helped you be successful in your careers, or things that you think are great takeaways?
Walt: You'll be more productive as a scientist if you choose people that can be your friends versus folks that are just good scientists. You'll be far more productive with those that you actually enjoy being around.
Eric: In addition to that, it's way more fun to collaborate than to be in your silo. So go out and look for the collaborations, as crazy as it seems. It is very much worth the effort to find collaborators. It will change the rest of your career and your lives.