Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of some historical perspectives on landscape evolution, identifies the key qualitative studies that have moved the science of large-scale geomorphology forward, explores some of the new numeric models that simulate real landscapes and real processes, and provides a glimpse of future landscape evolution studies. Landscape evolution models come in two basic types, qualitative and quantitative, that can be applied across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. The chapter focuses on models that address large-scale landforms and processes over the graded and cyclic scales of Schumm & Licthy (1965). The geomorphologic equivalent to the much sought unified theory of physical forces is a single landscape evolution model that can successfully explain the bewildering display of landforms and landscapes at all spatial and temporal scales and successfully predict the time-dependent changes in that landscape. One of the frontiers of landscape evolution research may include the direct reconstruction of the mean elevation of topography, as a global response to glacial climates, and the reconciliation of the present disparity of erosion rates from landscape of markedly similar relief and mean elevation.
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