The National Research Council has just completed a new report about landscape change, and have identified nine research challenges and four research initiatives to better understand how Earth’s landscapes change. The research could advance our understanding of environmental issues, from coastal erosion to landslides, by helping predict how processes such as wind, ice, water, tectonics, and living organisms drive changes in the Earth’s surface.
The nine challenges are:
- What does our planet’s past tell us about its future?
- How do geopatterns on Earth’s surface arise and what do they tell us about processes?
- How do landscapes influence and record climate and the movement of large pieces of the Earth’s crust?
- How does the biogeochemical reactor of the Earth’s surface respond to and shape landscapes on local to global scales?
- What are the transport laws that govern the evolution of the Earth’s surface?
- How do ecosystems and landscapes co-evolve?
- What controls landscape resilience to change?
- How will Earth’s surface evolve in the new era?
- How can science contribute to a sustainable Earth surface?
The four research areas aim to understand:
- interacting landscapes and climate
- the co-evolution of ecosystems and landscapes
- quantitative reconstruction of landscape dynamics across time scales
- the future of landscapes in the Anthropocene.
You can download the full report here.
