![]() “The previous synthesis laid out existing knowledge of a specific region and the gaps in our data and understanding. “This commentary is relevant for our colleagues studying geomorphic responses to climate change,” said USGS Research Geologist Jon Warrick, a co-author of the commentary. Additionally, the authors pose the question: Is the landscape behaving differently than in the past, or are apparent differences merely a product of higher-resolution imagery from remote-sensing tools such as satellites? The authors point out that human activity not only shapes landscapes, but that people tend to bias their data collection toward times and places with human land use, complicating attempts to tease out climate-change information. called on collaborators to establish ‘bellwether’ study-site lists for specific types of climate-driven landscape responses: coastal erosion, sediment flux in wildfire-altered landscapes, and permafrost thaw, among others. Geomorphically diverse settings that are experiencing climate-change impacts or are expected to in the coming decades (from upper left to lower right: eroding permafrost coast, river channel, drylands, cryosphere, steep hillslopes, and a recently burned region photographs by U.S. With this commentary, we wanted to expand the concept globally and refer to studies that weren’t available only a couple of years ago.” There are now so many studies being published about climate change and its effects-the literature is evolving quickly. “With that 2020 paper, we reviewed the scientific literature to identify gaps in data availability for Western U.S. “This commentary was born out of a previous synthesis that focused on landscape response to climate forcing in the Western U.S.,” said USGS Research Geologist Amy East, lead author of the commentary. It describes challenges to measuring these responses-short and incomplete data records, biases in data availability and resolution, for example-as well as possible opportunities to collect more informative data to better understand climate-change impacts. ![]() How can scientists studying these landscape processes keep pace with rapidly changing climatic conditions, and how can they ensure that they’re collecting the best available data to determine whether and where climate change is affecting landscapes?Ī new commentary by USGS scientists and collaborators looks at the current state of science that measures landscape responses to modern climate change. In many cases, those effects are already being seen-in rising sea levels, rapid permafrost thaw, accelerated coastal erosion, increasingly severe drought and flooding, and more frequent and intense wildfire, to name a few. Today’s changing climate will affect physical landscape processes around the world. ![]()
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