The Topographic Fingerprint of Landscapes
Where does a channel begin?
This deceptively simple question
has challenged researchers for decades. Even a single major storm can
reorganize an entire river network by initiating small streams, reminding us
that rivers are dynamic, not static. This uncertainty complicates one of the
most widely used landscape metrics: drainage density, defined as the total
channel length per unit area.
So, an important question arises:
what lies beyond drainage density?
Think about the ridging patterns
on human fingertips. Shaped through genetic evolution, they become permanent
markers of identity. Landscapes exhibit similar patterns. The spatial
organization of ridges across a terrain can be viewed as its topographic fingerprint,
preserving the imprint of climatic and geomorphic processes that shaped it over
time.
Building on this idea, we
proposed an alternative metric: ridge density, the density of topographic
ridges within a landscape (manuscript under review).
Our results show that hillslope diffusion and fluvial incision, mediated by climate, jointly organize landscape structure. Ridge density captures this organization consistently and encodes the topographic character of a landscape, much like a fingerprint encodes individual identity.
📄 Preprint available
here:
Author: Saba Shakeel Raina
PhD Research Scholar, IIT Bombay
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