Abstract
Abstract. Quantitative analysis of digital topographic data is an increasingly important part of many studies in the geosciences. Initially, performing these analyses was a niche endeavor, requiring detailed domain knowledge and programming skills, but increasingly broad, flexible, open-source code bases have been developed to increasingly democratize topographic analysis. However, many of these analyses still require specific computing environments and/or moderate levels of knowledge of both the relevant programming language and the correct way to take these fundamental building blocks and conduct an efficient and effective topographic analysis. To partially address this, we have written the Topographic Analysis Kit (TAK), which leverages the power of one of these open code bases, TopoToolbox, to build a series of high-level topographic analysis tools to perform a variety of common topographic analyses. These analyses include the generation of maps of normalized channel steepness, or χ, and selection and statistical analysis of populations of watersheds. No programming skills or advanced mastery of MATLAB is required for effective use of TAK. In addition – to expand the utility of TAK along with the primary functions, which like the underlying TopoToolbox functions require MATLAB and several proprietary toolboxes to run – we provide compiled versions of these functions that use the free MATLAB Runtime Environment for users who do not have institutional access to MATLAB or all of the required toolboxes.
Highlights
The efficient, quantitative analysis of digital topographic data is a primary underpinning of modern tectonic geomorphology research (e.g., Kirby and Whipple, 2012; Whittaker, 2012)
TopoToolbox is written in MATLAB, making it widely accessible as MATLAB is common in many academic environments and is a relatively easy language to learn
If a user does not have access to MATLAB, or all of the required toolboxes, they can use the compiled versions instead. These compiled versions rely on the MATLAB Runtime Environment (MRE), which is a free program distributed by MathWorks, the maker of MATLAB, for running compiled versions of MATLAB code
Summary
The efficient, quantitative analysis of digital topographic data is a primary underpinning of modern tectonic geomorphology research (e.g., Kirby and Whipple, 2012; Whittaker, 2012). We present a new body of functions, the Topographic Analysis Kit (TAK) that is designed to be a relatively complete set of basic topographic analysis tools that includes a variety of common tasks. These include batch processing of stream network maps and continuous grids of ksn and χ , and fitting ksn values to selected stream profiles that largely replicate and improve upon the original Stream Profiler routines. We describe some of the basic functionality of TAK and provide a representative example of the potential utility of the set of functions for selecting and analyzing watersheds in a basin-averaged approach
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