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Please note that this session was withdrawn and is no longer available in the respective programme. This withdrawal might have been the result of a merge with another session.

SSS10.12

Fire and landform processes: Feedbacks between vegetation, fire, and hydrogeomorphic response (co-organized)
Co-Conveners: Christoph Langhans , Petter Nyman , Cathelijne Stoof 

In this session we seek to integrate and move beyond post-fire erosion response to single rainfall events attributed to changes in soil properties. The objective is to extend understanding of hydrologic and geomorphic response related to vegetation disturbance by fire at broader spatial and temporal scales. A key driver of landform processes, fire interacts with vegetation over time where vegetation and climate control patterns of fire behavior and the effects of fire control patterns of runoff and erosion over the period of vegetation recovery. What are the mechanisms of these feedbacks across spatial scales and over multiple events? How does fire affect snowmelt and thereby groundwater recharge? How do process interactions over time influence trajectories of landform evolution? How will changing climate and human activities alter these trajectories if predictions of larger, high intensity, and more frequent fires are realized? Will changes in trajectories trigger tipping points of landscape response? What new approaches are needed to bridge the gap between knowledge at fine scales and the need to develop broad scale understanding of the integrated systems and processes? Answers to these questions hold serious implications for sustainability of ecosystem function, water for human uses, and catchment management. This session invites empirical, modelling, and theoretical contributions that extend knowledge, process understanding, and conceptual frameworks of hydrogeomorphic response to fire and vegetation interactions. Studies should be at the broader spatial-temporal scale, or at event and small spatial scales but show implications to landform processes.