2019 Associate Editor Excellence Awards and Editor's Citations for Excellence in Review

TheVadose Zone JournalEditorial Board has selected three individuals for recognition for excellence in performing their work as associate editors. The recognition is based on their efforts in establishing a quality review process— for timely and professional manuscript editing, for fair and rigorous integration of reviewer comments, and for overall excellence in managing a professional review process. The Editorial Board has also chosen four individuals for the Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Review. Members of the VZJ Editorial Board want to express their deepest appreciation for these associate editors and volunteer reviewers, who have benefited our journal, our community, and our sciences through their outstanding work.

The Vadose Zone Journal Editorial Board has selected three individuals for recognition for excellence in performing their work as associate editors. The recognition is based on their efforts in establishing a quality review processfor timely and professional manuscript editing, for fair and rigorous integration of reviewer comments, and for overall excellence in managing a professional review process. The Editorial Board has also chosen four individuals for the Editor's Citation for Excellence in Review. Members of the VZJ Editorial Board want to express their deepest appreciation for these associate editors and volunteer reviewers, who have benefited our journal, our community, and our sciences through their outstanding work. Lowland Observatory. Since 2016, Ute is the scientific coordinator of the BonaRes Centre for Soil Research within the BMBF funding initiative "Soil as a sustainable resource for the bioeconomy -BonaRes." Her current work focuses on the investigation of the influence of soil management on soil functions.

Naftali Lazarovitch
Naftali Lazarovitch is an associate professor at the French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received his PhD in 2006 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His studies aim at increasing agricultural productivity while maintaining a sustainable environment through optimal fertigation scheduling. This approach is supported through numerical and analytical modeling, as well as measurement and interpretation of water flow, solute and heat transport in the soil-plant-atmosphere system.

Majdi Abou Najm
Majdi Abou Najm is a faculty member at the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California Davis. His research interests have focused around studying and optimizing the biophysical processes and system-connections along the water-soil-plant-atmosphere system for sustainable resource management. This multiscale goal requires fundamental understanding and characterization of the complex biophysical interactions in the critical zone and with the Anthroposphere. He is interested in developing nondestructive, low-cost, and open-source characterization methods for porous media, and in using operations research for cross-scale optimum resource management. He developed new experimental and theoretical methods for characterizing cracks and macropores in soils, for abstracting the pore structure, and for modeling infiltration, flow, and transport. Furthermore, he developed optimization tools with broad application from characterization of porous media to food-water-land coupling to integrated solid waste management and water-energy-food nexus management. He seeks to develop a new generation of macroscopic averaging and abstraction models of pore structure to integrate with and advance the modeling of water flow and nutrient or pollutant transport in porous media across scales.

Gerard Heuvelink
Gerard Heuvelink holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Environmental Sciences. His PhD research on uncertainty propagation in spatial modeling with GIS marks the start of a scientific career in spatial uncertainty analysis and pedometrics. Gerard chaired the IUSS Pedometrics Commission from 2003 to 2006, received the Richard Webster medal for the best body of work that advanced pedometrics in 2014, and chaired the Organising Committee of the 25th anniversary Pedometrics Conference in Wageningen in 2017. He is Deputy Editor of the European Journal of Soil Science and editorial board member of Geoderma, Spatial Statistics, Journal of Integrative Agriculture, and two more ISI journals. Gerard is a senior researcher with ISRIC -World Soil Information and a special professor in Pedometrics and Digital Soil Mapping with the Soil Geography and Landscape group of Wageningen University.

Andrew Binley
Andrew Binley is Professor of Hydrogeophysics in the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University UK. His research focuses on improved understanding of the transport of fluids within the shallow (top 100 m) subsurface environment. Much of this work concentrates on the development of geophysical approaches to characterizing the subsurface as a dynamic system, either through new algorithms for data assimilation or new insight into links between hydraulic and geophysical properties. Application areas currently include groundwater-surface water interaction, plant-soil-water exchanges, and nutrient transport in the vadose zone.

Qiuping Fu
Qiuping Fu is currently working at the College of Hydraulic and Civil Engineering, Xinjiang Agricultural University. She completed her Ph.D. in soil science at the Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Ministry of Water Resources, in 2013. Her current areas of research include: (ą) efficient utilization of agricultural water and fertilizer resources and its environmental effects, (ii) field monitoring and simulation of soil hydrological process, and (iii) theory and technology of water-saving irrigation.

Harry Schomberg
Harry Schomberg is a Research Ecologist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD. His research focuses on water and nutrient management in sustainable organic and conventional grain cropping systems. His research career has focused on improving conservation cropping systems, crop residue management, nutrient management, and crop residue decomposition models.