Landscape evolution models (LEMs) have matured into powerful and widely used tools in the geomorphologist’s toolbox. Increasingly robust representations of weathering, erosion, sediment transport and hillslope processes allow LEMs to function as digital laboratories in which hypotheses about landscape dynamics can be explored across spatial and especially temporal scales that are impossible to directly observe.
LEMs have been used to investigate a wide range of questions, including the response of landscapes to climate and tectonic forcing; river incision and sediment transport; hillslope evolution and landslide dynamics; glacial and periglacial processes; soil formation and weathering; drainage-network development; interactions between geomorphic processes and ecosystems; and the propagation of disturbances through coupled Earth-surface systems. Their ability to represent interacting processes also offers opportunities to explore cascading natural hazards, from landslide–river interactions to chains of sediment, flooding and slope instability, making LEMs increasingly relevant to a key societal concern.
At the same time, the field is entering an exciting period of methodological tension. As process-based models, LEMs seek to encode physical mechanisms and study their emerging interactions explicitly, while AI and data-driven approaches offer powerful alternatives for identifying patterns and emulating processes. Rather than treating these approaches as competing paradigms, this tension raises fundamental questions about what we expect models to represent, how we evaluate them, and how process understanding can be combined with emerging computational methods.
This session welcomes contributions from researchers who use, modify, or develop landscape evolution models, as well as those whose research questions could benefit from the application of LEMs.