Understanding transient response to climate change in coupled hydro-eco-geomorphic landscapes

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Climate change is arguably the biggest challenge facing people this century. As part of living with climate change we must understand how our landscape will respond to it. This isn't a simple task; our landscape is defined by a complex set of intertwined processes: as water and sediment moves across the landscape it effects the vegetation that lives there which in turn controls these water and sediment processes. In the UK, climate change will mean greater extremes of temperature, more winter rainfall, and more intense storms leading to wetter upland slopes; plants will have to adapt to this altered environment and these in combination will affect the way the landscape responds to climatic changes. This has important and potentially costly implications for the people that live and work in upland areas. My fellowship will advance our understanding of the linkages between hydrology, ecology and geomorphology through research collaboration with international experts across the US and Europe. One way of reducing its impact would be to increase our ability to predict the landscape's response to altered climate. Models are excellent tools to do this; these simplified versions of reality give us the ability to make predictions about things that have not yet happened. By knowing what factors to look for we can identify areas that will be particularly susceptible to this kind of event, without the event needing to happen. Current models provide valuable information on individual processes but fail to capture the overall picture because they miss the links between these processes, particularly the influence of plants on landslides and vice versa. Within this fellowship I will demonstrate the importance of these links and provide a framework for holistic research that addresses the earth surface system without disciplinary boundaries. I will start by addressing some of the problems with the models that deal with sediment and water transfer in isolation. In doing this I will both improve our understanding of how this system responds to climate change and provide a template to show how important landslides are to the development of vegetation in an environment. This is important because ecosystems provide important and incompletely understood services, including carbon storage and nutrient regulation. I can then work the relationships between vegetation, sediment and water back into the models to improve our ability to predict the landscape's response to changing climate. These predictions are valuable because we know that our landscape is set to change; this research helps us to predict how and when, and that knowledge allows us to face the challenges of these changes.