About the Book
Landscape Evolution: Landforms, Ecosystems and Soils asks us to think holistically, to look for the interactions between the Earth’s component surface systems, to consider how universal laws and historical and geographical contingency work together, and to ponder the implications of nonlinear dynamics in landscapes, ecosystems, and soils. Development, evolution, landforms, topography, soils, ecosystems, and hydrological systems are inextricably intertwined. While empirical studies increasingly incorporate these interactions, theories and conceptual frameworks addressing landforms, soils, and ecosystems are pursued largely independently. This is partly due to different academic disciplines, traditions, and lexicons involved, and partly due to the disparate time scales sometimes encountered. Landscape Evolution explicitly synthesizes and integrates these theories and threads of inquiry, arguing that all are guided by a general principle of efficiency selection. A key theme is that evolutionary trends are probabilistic, emergent outcomes of efficiency selection rather than purported goal functions. This interdisciplinary reference will be useful for academic and research scientists across the Earth sciences.
Table of Contents:
1. An integrated approach to landscape evolution2. Earth surface systems as supraorganisms3. Observing landscape evolution4. It depends on the scale: scale contingency in landscape evolution5. Historical contingency in landscape evolution6. Attractors and goal functions in landscape evolution7. Thresholds, tipping points, and instability8. Selection and landscape evolution9. The perfect landscape10. Landscape evolution and environmental change
About the Author :
Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Earth Surface Systems and University Research Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky and an affiliate of the "Blue Cats" research team in the Forest Ecology unit of the Sylva Tarouc Institute, Brno, Czech Republic. He previously held faculty positions at East Carolina, Texas A&M, and Arizona State Universities. Phillips has been recognized with distinguished career awards from both the British Society for Geomorphology (Linton Medal) and the Geomorphology Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (Marcus Award), as well as several other research awards. He is author of more than 200 refereed research publications across the fields of geomorphology, pedology, hydrology, ecology, environmental science, and quantitative geography.
Review :
"Starting with a deceptively simple sentence, “Landforms, topography, soils, and ecosystems affect, and are affected by, each other (p. 1), this book tackles some of the biggest questions about the world around us. In essence, it sets out a vision and methodology for an integrated, coevolutionary approach to the development of Earth surface systems. Jonathan Phillips has a very strong track record of research and writing on the interactions between geomorphological, pedological, and ecological processes, with a particular focus on coevolutionary dynamics. He is the only person who could have written this volume, in which he brings together many strands of his work to date, providing a provocative, detailed, and magisterial account of what we know and the challenges that face attempts to push back the frontiers of knowledge. The author is unafraid of delving into complexity and controversy, and expects a lot of his readers. As a result, this volume is not an entirely easy read, but it is well worth wrestling with. He manages to link big, brave conceptual ideas with formal mathematical approaches (such as abstracted systems theory) and apply these to detailed case studies. He covers a broad sweep of ideas and material from a diverse range of disciplines, and explains concepts in an engaging way. I learned a lot. Some of the contents will be familiar to those who have read some of his prolific output of scientific papers over the years, but the novelty lies in bringing it all together in a single place, and in attempting to tie it all together convincingly....
Who should read this volume? It is aimed at academic and research scientists across the Earth sciences, but students in those disciplines will also find much of interest here. Its strong points are its bold vision and persuasive arguments....
Overall, this is a stimulating and brave volume, which provides a thought-provoking summary of a major corpus of scientific scholarship." --Heather A. Viles, The Quarterly Review of Biology
