ABSTRACT
Landscapes comprise a variety of geomorphic features including bedrock either bare or draped with a mantle of soil and sediment. Within the landscape some features represent reservoirs for the storage of sediment. Three fundamental geomorphic processes (erosion, transport, and deposition) act on sediment particles in these reservoirs to change geomorphic features. These processes require available sediment and a driver such as wind, rainfall, runoff, or gravity. They are components of any process that transfers sediment between different sediment-storage reservoirs. These transfer processes can be viewed as complex non-linear systems characterized by power laws, thresholds, feedbacks, and sensitivity, which can produce a response to the driver that is inherently unstable and, under certain conditions, extreme.
