Meet Simon Moulds, PLOS Climate Section Editor for Hydrology

In this blog post, we speak to Dr Simon Moulds, PLOS Climate Section Editor for Hydrology.

Could you tell us a bit about how you ended up in your area of study?

As a civil engineering undergraduate I was always drawn to the courses that covered water: fluid mechanics, water treatment, flood risk management. From the University of Birmingham, I went to Imperial College London to study the MSc in Hydrology and Water Resources Management. I stayed to complete a PhD under Wouter Buytaert, where I developed models to quantify the impact of large-scale land use change and intensification in northern India on regional water resources. After postdoctoral positions at Imperial and Oxford, I was appointed Lecturer (=Assistant Professor) in Hydrology at the University of Edinburgh in 2023.

What’s the focus of your current work, and what questions are you hoping to address?

My overarching research aim is to reliably simulate and predict river flow globally. We live in an age of unprecedented data availability, yet there are still large parts of the Earth with little to no in situ river flow measurement. In my research I use novel remote and in situ observations as well as hydrological modelling to fill in the gaps and improve our understanding of the hydrological cycle, so that we can make reliable predictions of flood and drought risk worldwide.

Why do the principles of Open Access and Open Science matter to you?

I believe that science should be both accessible and reproducible. As a computational hydrologist, one of the barriers I faced early in my career was the use of closed-source codebases that prevented other researchers from reproducing and extending computational methods and analyses. This situation has now improved, and most scientific code and data is made available alongside journal articles. Yet Open Access is even more fundamental: by removing barriers to science, we allow more people with diverse backgrounds to participate in knowledge creation and dissemination.

Why did you decide to join PLOS Climate as a Section Editor?

I was attracted by the opportunity to shape the direction of the Hydrology section of PLOS Climate at a relatively early stage.

What kind of papers would you be particularly excited to see submitted to your section of PLOS Climate?

I would be particularly excited to see empirical studies that make use of novel in situ or remote observational data to explore aspects of hydro-climatology that have historically been under-observed, especially where new monitoring techniques have led to the discovery of previously undetectable hydro-climatological phenomena. Inspired by a recent perspective article, I’m interested in contributions that enable a detailed understanding of hydro-climatological systems at scale– i.e., how can we quantify feedbacks between the atmosphere and hydrological systems at scale, in a manner that is sufficiently detailed to be useful to water managers? I also welcome papers that explore coupled human-environmental systems across scales. Above all, I’m excited to see the breadth and depth of submissions to PLOS Climate, encounter diverse voices across the hydro-climatological sciences, and facilitate a unique forum for advancing knowledge and practice.