Rights statement: Open Access funded by Natural Environment Research Council Under a Creative Commons license
Final published version, 608 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - What we see now
T2 - event-persistence and the predictability of hydro-eco-geomorphological systems
AU - Beven, Keith John
N1 - Open Access funded by Natural Environment Research Council Under a Creative Commons license
PY - 2015/2/24
Y1 - 2015/2/24
N2 - What we see now in the landscape is the result of a long history of events with varying degrees of persistence. We have only limited access to much of that history and we know that many current events have only a minimal impact on what we see. Even rather extreme events may have impacts that are not very long-lasting but can have the effect of changing the antecedent states for future events. That means that sampling of sequences of events might be important in understanding the evolution of the catchments. In some cases, however, extreme events can have an impact on the system that persists over hundreds or thousands of years. Any evolution of the landscape is then constrained by those past events, however much it might be also constrained by self-organisational principles. It might be difficult to verify those principles given the epistemic uncertainties about past histories and system properties that are generic to the studies that are possible within a research project or career. These arguments are investigated in a simple slab model of landslip failures in a hillslope hollow subject to stochastic forcing over long periods of time. The complementarity of an event-persistence approach to hydro-eco-geomorphological systems is captured in suggestions for future research questions.
AB - What we see now in the landscape is the result of a long history of events with varying degrees of persistence. We have only limited access to much of that history and we know that many current events have only a minimal impact on what we see. Even rather extreme events may have impacts that are not very long-lasting but can have the effect of changing the antecedent states for future events. That means that sampling of sequences of events might be important in understanding the evolution of the catchments. In some cases, however, extreme events can have an impact on the system that persists over hundreds or thousands of years. Any evolution of the landscape is then constrained by those past events, however much it might be also constrained by self-organisational principles. It might be difficult to verify those principles given the epistemic uncertainties about past histories and system properties that are generic to the studies that are possible within a research project or career. These arguments are investigated in a simple slab model of landslip failures in a hillslope hollow subject to stochastic forcing over long periods of time. The complementarity of an event-persistence approach to hydro-eco-geomorphological systems is captured in suggestions for future research questions.
KW - Event persistence
KW - Self-organisation
KW - Event sequences
KW - Shallow landslide model
KW - Epistemic uncertainty
U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.07.019
DO - 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.07.019
M3 - Journal article
VL - 298
SP - 4
EP - 15
JO - Ecological Modelling
JF - Ecological Modelling
SN - 0304-3800
ER -