In the context of molecularly-dated phylogenies, inferences informed by ancestral habitat reconstruction can yield valuable insights into the origins of biomes, palaeoenvironments and landforms. In this paper, we use dated phylogenies of 12 plant clades from the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) in southern Africa to test hypotheses of Neogene climatic and geomorphic evolution. Our combined dataset f...

We describe an application of machine learning to the problem of geomorphic mapping of planetary surfaces. Mapping landforms on planetary surfaces is an important task and the first step to deepen our understanding of many geologic processes. Until now such maps have been manually drawn by a domain expert. We describe a framework to automate the mapping process by means of segmentation and clas...

Scientists have long assumed that the physical structure and condition of stream and river channels have pervasive effects on biological communities and processes, but specific tests are few. To investigate the influence of the stream-reach geomorphic state on in-stream habitat and aquatic macroinvertebrate communities, we compared measures of habitat conditions and macroinvertebrate community ...

Pulses of CO2 injected into the martian atmosphere more recently than 4 Ga can place the atmosphere into a stable, higher pressure, warmer greenhouse state. One to two bar pulses of CO2 added to the atmosphere during the past several billion years are sufficient to raise global mean temperatures above 240 or 250 K for tens to hundreds of millions of years, even when accounting for CO2 condensat...

Several glacier-like landforms have been identified on Mars. We can view some of them with Google Earth and its virtual Mars planet. In the images of Ismeniae Fossae glaciers, the flow lines of these landforms are clearly visible too.

Topographic metrics are designed to quantify scale-relevant relationships between geometric properties of landscapes reveal the processes shaping them. They have long been derived from topographic flow routing algorithms, initially developed for coarse Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), whose resolution (≥30 m) and poor precision did not resolve correctly patterns channel width. Since high DEMs m...

Through the new method for automatic extraction of a tidal network from topographic or bathymetric fields described in a companion paper [Fagherazzi et al., this issue], we analyze the morphology of aggregated patterns that we observe in nature in different tidal environments. Specifically, we define, on the basis of a hydrodynamic analysis, a procedure for watershed delineation and for the ide...

Irreplaceable, self-organizing landforms and the endemic and ecologically specialized biodiversity they support are threatened globally by anthropogenic disturbances. Although the outcome of disrupting landforms is somewhat understood, little information exists that documents population consequences of landform disturbance on endemic biodiversity. Conservation strategies for species dependent u...

In fluviokarst landscapes flow may be partitioned into its surface and subsurface components as well as into diffuse and concentrated flow. The competition among these is hypothesized to be responsible for the divergence of the landscape in a fluviokarst region of central Kentucky into depression-rich, unchannelled karst-rich and channel-poor (KRCP) and strongly fluvially dissected channel-rich...