Research in any field of Earth sciences and beyond requires a conceptual framework underpinning the actual set of case studies. Development of concepts essentially determines the set of methods applied and, accordingly, the potentials and limitations of generated data as well as their interpretation. Hence, conceptual and methodological considerations go both prior to and beyond case studies and ask for tools from various fields such as scale transfer approaches, feedbacks between triggers and processes, evolution of complexity and non-linearity, inversion of landforms/deposits to processes and vice versa.

This session aims to bring together those with an interest in the relationships between observation and interpretation and the limitations that they may introduce into our work. In this overarching session we welcome contributions from any field of Earth surface research that focus on conceptual topics, may it be presentations of new techniques, methodological advances, (re-)evaluations of established paradigms or comparisons of apparently contradicting opinions.