Four academic brothers (of mine)

I have many academic brother since Andrea Rinaldo is very prolific in generating first class researchers. I have even more I consider the inheritance of Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, my postdoc advisor at (that time at) Texas A&M Unversity. Of the many three agreed to send me the presentations they gave at the Honour doctorate of Andrea Rinaldo, and you can find them with a little comment here below. 

The older (of the three) brother, Marco Marani, from Padova University and Duke, presented a work on the soil-water-plants continuum. He emphasize the role of roots in modifying the soil water distribution, otherwise controlled by Darcy flows. However, he also studied and talked about the influence of the soil-plants-atmosphere continuum. The presentation is here. The couple of references cited are: Volpe et al., 2013 and Manoli et al., 2014. 

Gianluca Botter talked about the travel time distribution approach to catchment scale transport. A topic that intersects also the “old water paradox” querelle, but is, in general, pretty effective in getting the distribution of pollutants. This approach has a long story that put its roots, in Gedeon Dagan’s work, as well as in Rodriguez-Iturbe geomorphic unit hydrograph. Andrea own papers on Mass response function with Sandro Marani can also be considered at the foundations of this presentation. 

Among the reference, recent papers on the topic are Botter et al., 2010 and Benettin et al., 2013. The presentation is here

Enrico Bertuzzo (GS) covered instead the new topic of water borne  diseases and their spreading along rivers. The way Enrico and coworkers analysed the problem, certainly inherited many notions and ideas sprout the early studies on river networks structure by Andrea (I had a part in it), but also on recent and domain specific achievements and findings. In the presentation he cited just one paper, but the research outcomes on the topic are certainly copious and exciting. The presentation is here. 

Andrea D’Alpaos (GS)  talked about tidal networks, their formation, their shapes, their similarity or dissimilarity from river networks. All of it in a blend of equations, analysis in the field and lab experiments. Another fascinating topic that was started with Andrea.  The presentation is here.

Overall is interesting to judge the differentiation of topics and methods used by the authors, expressing that each developed his on research personality and attitude.