Research in any field of Earth sciences and beyond requires a conceptual framework underpinning the actual set of case studies. Developed concepts essentially determine 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. Key aspects may be encountered not only in single disciplines, but may relate to common challenges in 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 at bringing together those with an interest in the relationships between observation and interpretation, and in the limitations that the relations may introduce to our work. In this overarching session we welcome contributions from any field of Earth surface research with a focus on conceptual topics, may it be presentations of new techniques, methodological advances, (re-)evaluations of established paradigms or comparisons of apparently contradicting opinions.