A wide variety of metrics – loss of soil fertility, proportion of ecosystem production appropriated by humans, availability of ecosystem services, changing climate – indicates that we are in a period of overshoot (Hooke et al., 2012). Overshoot occurs when a population exceeds the local carrying capacity. An environment’s carrying capacity for a given
species is the number of individuals “living in a given manner, which the environment can support indefinitely” (Catton, 1980, p. 4). One reason we are in overshoot is that we have consistently ignored critical zone integrity and resilience, and particularly ignored how the cumulative history of human manipulation of the critical zone has reduced integrity and resilience. Geomorphologists are uniquely trained this website to explicitly consider past changes that have occurred over varying time find more scales, and we can bring this training to management of landscapes and ecosystems. We can use our knowledge of historical context in a forward-looking approach that emphasizes both quantifying and predicting responses to changing climate and resource use, and management actions to protect and restore desired landscape and ecosystem conditions. Management can be viewed as the ultimate test of scientific understanding: does the landscape or ecosystem respond to
a particular human manipulation in the way that we predict it will? Management of the critical zone during the Anthropocene therefore provides an exciting opportunity for geomorphologists to use
their knowledge of critical zone processes to enhance the sustainability of diverse landscapes and ecosystems. I thank Anne Chin, Anne Jefferson, and Karl Wegmann for the invitation to speak at a Geological Society of America topical session on geomorphology in the Anthropocene, which led to this paper. Comments by L. Allan James and two anonymous reviewers helped to improve an earlier draft. “
“Anthropogenic sediment is an extremely important element of change during the Anthropocene. It drives lateral, Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase longitudinal, vertical, and temporal connectivity in fluvial systems. It provides evidence of the history and geographic locations of past anthropogenic environmental alterations, the magnitude and character of those changes, and how those changes may influence present and future trajectories of geomorphic response. It may contain cultural artifacts, biological evidence of former ecosystems (pollen, macrofossils, etc.), or geochemical and mineralogical signals that record the sources of sediment and the character of land use before and after contact. Rivers are often dominated by cultural constructs with extensive legacies of anthropogeomorphic and ecologic change. A growing awareness of these changes is guiding modern river scientists to question if there is such a thing as a natural river (Wohl, 2001 and Wohl and Merritts, 2007).
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