Controls of climate, topography, vegetation, and lithology on drainage density extracted from high resolution topography data

Mark Melton in 1957 found that climate, basin morphometry, and surficial variables control drainage density (Dd), but differences observed between field surveyed channels and those mapped on topographic contours or blue lines left doubts on these results. Later, several landscape evolution model and observational studies analyzed the behavior of Dd. However, only a few studies have been performed over a large number of landscapes of different characteristics and have relied on high resolution topography data. We revisit Melton’s hypothesis by using meter-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) in 101 subbasins in the USA. We first propose a dimensionless drainage density (Ddd) metric based on the ratio of likely...

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Analyzing high resolution topography for advancing the understanding of mass and energy transfer through landscapes: A review

The study of mass and energy transfer across landscapes has recently evolved to comprehensive considerations acknowledging the role of biota and humans as geomorphic agents, as well as the importance of small-scale landscape features. A contributing and supporting factor to this evolution is the emergence over the last two decades of technologies able to acquire high resolution topography (HRT) (meter and sub-meter resolution) data. Landscape features can now be captured at an appropriately fine spatial resolution at which surface processes operate; this has revolutionized the way we study Earth-surface processes. The wealth of information contained in HRT also presents considerable challenges. For example, selection...

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GeoNet: An open source software for the automatic and objective extraction of channel heads, channel network, and channel morphology from high resolution topography data

Extracting hydrologic and geomorphic features from high resolution topography data is a challenging and computationally demanding task. We illustrate the new capabilities and features of GeoNet, an open source software for the extraction of channel heads, channel networks, and channel morphology from high resolution topography data. The method has been further developed and includes a median filtering operation to remove roads in engineered landscapes and the calculation of hillslope lengths to inform the channel head identification procedure. The software is now available in both MATLAB and Python, allowing it to handle datasets larger than the ones previously analyzed. We present the workflow of GeoNet using three...

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