What is it about?
Updating past review papers, the present work discusses six main components of a landscape evolution model, namely continuity of mass, hillslope processes, water flow, erosion and sediment transport, soil properties, vegetation dynamics. The more common schematizations are discussed in a plain language, pointing out the current knowledge and possible open questions to be addressed in the future, towards an improvement of the reliability of such kind of models in describing the evolution of fluvial landscapes and river networks.
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Why is it important?
Despite landscape evolution modelling is based on a rather long tradition, and scientists and practitioners are studying how to schematize the processes involved in the evolution of a landscape since decades, there is still the need for improving the knowledge of the physical mechanisms and their numerical coding.
Perspectives
The present review showed that substantial progress has been made in quantitative modelling the evolution of the Earth’s surface in terms of water–sediment–vegetation interactions, but much still remains to be accomplished and there are many open questions that can be addressed in the future. On the one part, there is the need for refining and testing landscape evolution models in a larger variety of cases to cover a multitude of spatial and temporal scales, by means of new and improved computing techniques. On the other part, one of the major challenges lies in developing experimental and field-based datasets for testing and validating numerical models across a wide range of spatiotemporal scales and covering different geomorphic environments.
Dr Michael Nones
Institute of Geophysics - Polish Academy of Sciences
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On the main components of landscape evolution modelling of river systems, Acta Geophysica, January 2020, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s11600-020-00401-8.
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