ABSTRACT
Geographic forms and patterns are viewed as resulting from various physical and social processes operating at different scales (Wilson and Gallant 2000; Elith and Leathwick 2009). The meso-and topo-scales (a few to hundreds of kilometers) are important for environmental, hydrological, and ecological research (Hammond 1964; Pike 2000; Shary et al. 2002; Iwahashi and Pike 2007; Evans and Lindsay 2010). For example, finer-scale variation in climate results from meso-and toposcale topography and rock type, thus highlighting the importance of topography in climatic regionalization (Bailey 1996). Many topographic properties are incorporated as controlling factors for hydrologic modeling (Beven and Kirkby 1979; Wood et al. 1988), as reviewed by Wilson and Gallant (2000). Soil development in many landscapes occurs in response to water movements in the landscape. Terrain properties can characterize these flow paths and, therefore, soil development, as demonstrated by a terrain-soil correlation study on a 5.4-ha topo-sequence in Colorado (Moore et al. 1993). Vegetation distribution in space and time, which responds to water, light, and nutrient availability (Poorter and Nagel 2000; Wilson and Gallant 2000), has been modeled using combinations of topographic properties, as shown by Guisan et al. (2002) and Van Niel et al. (2004).
