Chances are good that most people reading this are situated on a hillslope, as hillslopes cover some 90% of the Earth’s landmass.
October 13, 2022
Chances are good that most people reading this are situated on a hillslope, as hillslopes cover some 90% of the Earth’s landmass.
Hillslopes are critical landscape features that move water from ridges down to valleys, transport sediments and nutrients, and link terrestrial ecosystems with aquatic ones—facets of a hillslope’s „connectivity.“
A new large-scale analysis of hillslope connectivity at the continental scale from the University of Kansas was recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The study gives new understanding of mechanisms that determine how effectively hillslopes drive floods and landslides, as well as promote the presence of wetlands.
„‚Connectivity‘ describes the likelihood that a part of the landscape is linked to a river,“ said lead author Admin Husic, Harold A. and Donna R. Phelps Chair’s Council Assistant Professor of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering at KU. „If you know a certain component of the landscape is highly connected to a river network—well then, that part of the landscape could contribute a lot of water as well as other contaminants to the network. In a way, you can identify some source areas you might want to target for management.
„More basically, ‚connectivity‘ describes the movement of water—what compartments of a landscape are efficient at moving water as runoff. Some hillslopes readily convey this runoff quickly. Other hillslopes aren’t,“ he said.
The study incorporated data from sources like digital-elevation models created by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Global Earthquake Model, the North American Land Data Assimilation System, the Global Landslide Catalog and the Dartmouth Flood Observatory database.
