Human activities may leave a remarkable signature in the landscape, by altering the global climate, ecosystems and more pronounced the Earth’s surface. Demographic growth, socio-economic development and urbanization have intensified land use conversions, and have profoundly affected soil erosion and fluxes of particulate matter, nutrients and contaminants into and through fluvial systems. To date, human-engineered landscapes cover a large extent of the Earth's surface. The legacy of these impacts exerts strong influence over modern and future environment, and may pose critical limits to human development. Therefore, the recognition that most landscapes have co-evolved as a result of natural and anthropogenic forcing represents a challenge for better understanding human-landscape interactions. The purpose of this session is to stimulate the debate on human-landscape interactions, with a special focus on global soil and sediment transfers, by presenting the state of the art of this research field, and by underlining potential future directions.

The session particularly invites recent work on new advances on the quantification of time-lags of responses, feedback mechanisms, and threshold behavior in human-landscape interactions. We welcome studies on the quantification of human disturbances from a wide range of technological applications such as remote sensing for Earth surveys, empirical and modeling approaches, and geochemical tracing techniques in soils and sediments. Early stage researchers are strongly encouraged to present their research.

This session is sponsored by the PAGES working group on Global Soil and Sediment transfers in the Anthropocene (GloSS) and the BSG - British Society for Geomorphology

The most interesting papers will be considered for a special section in the journal ANTHROPOCENE.