Assessing landscape response to modern climate change: how much do we know?
Amy East
Description: Today, climate change is affecting virtually all terrestrial and nearshore settings. This presentation will discuss the challenges of identifying and measuring climate-driven physical landscape responses to modern warming and its associated hydrologic shifts. These challenges include short and incomplete data records, land use and seismicity masking climatic effects, biases in data availability and resolution, and signal attenuation in sedimentary systems. Despite such challenges, the scientific community has important opportunities to learn from historical and paleo data, to select especially sensitive study sites, and to ensure that null results are reported to better characterize the extent and nuances of climate-change effects. Determining with greater confidence whether landscape changes are attributable to climate change (as opposed to land use, tectonic effects, or natural variability) also will lead to better predictive capabilities. Evaluating and quantifying climate-driven sedimentary and geomorphic changes will enable societies to better manage the effects on human health and safety, infrastructure, water–food–energy security, economies, and ecosystems that follow from climate-driven physical landscape change.