Climate change, human activities and other perturbations are likely to influence existing patterns of weathering, erosion, transport and deposition of material (e.g., sediments, solutes, nutrients, carbon, wood) across defined landscape components and units. While it is still a great challenge to develop an improved understanding of how such changes interact and affect slope and fluvial denudation rates, source-to-sink fluxes and sedimentary budgets, such quantitative analyses promise to be an efficient framework to assess the impact of environmental changes and disturbances to sediment dynamics and to evaluate landscape sensitivity. The current knowledge on sediment dynamics and the sediment cascade within Holocene to contemporary climates forms the basis for predicting the consequences of ongoing and future climate change. However, much of our information is still limited in terms of spatial and temporal coverage and needs to be extended and consolidated. Hillslopes are important elements of the terrestrial Earth surface. The rates at which mass-wasting processes act to modify hillslope morphometries are extremely varied and are driven by a number of diverse physical, chemical and biological processes. These processes span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are considered to react sensitively to global climate changes, anthropogenic impacts and other perturbations. Fluvial denudation includes both chemical and mechanical fluvial denudation and its spatiotemporal variability is controlled by a wide range of meteorological and environmental drivers. Only after coordinated research efforts and integration of regional datasets it is advisable to apply and test, with an acceptable degree of reliability, models of landscape response to climate change, anthropogenic impacts and other perturbations like, e.g., fires and earthquakes. This session includes oral and poster contributions on hillslope and fluvial denudation, source-to-sink fluxes/correlations and sedimentary budgets from small headwater systems to continental scales, and from long-term to contemporary timescales. The presented studies were conducted in a range of different climatic environments. A wide range of different techniques and methods of data collection and generation, e.g., from field-based to remotely sensed, and analysis/modeling is provided.

Solicited speakers:
Jonathan L. Carrivick (Leeds)
Oliver Sass (Graz)