Landscape—the unique combination of landforms, plants, animals, and weather that compose any natural place—is inherently transient. Each essay in Transient Landscapes introduces this idea of a constantly metamorphosing global landscape, revealing how to see the ubiquity of landscape transience, both that which results through Earth’s natural environmental and climatological processes and that which comes from human intervention. The essays are grouped by type of environmental change: long-term, large-scale transformation driven by geologic forces such as tectonic uplift and volcanism; natural variability at shorter time scales, such as seasonal flooding; and modifications resulting from human activities, such as timber harvest, land drainage, and pollution. Each essay is set in a unique geographic location—including such diverse places as New Zealand, Northern California, Costa Rica, and the Scottish Highlands—and is largely drawn from Wohl’s personal experience researching in the field. A combination of travel writing, nature writing, and science writing, Transient Landscapes is a beautiful and thoughtful journey through the natural world.

"The expansive areas around large airports, affected by noise, infrastructure, and transient forms of architecture, have until now not been researched as a phenomenon. But these noise landscapes are emerging worldwide, often surpassing the neighbouring city in size, and sometimes rivalling it in economic importance. On the basis of eight European case studies (Amsterdam, Zurich, London-Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid and the two Paris airports) this book provides the first account of how these landscapes emerged as the result of technical determinations, what is taking place in them, and how they can be interpreted."--Back cover.

Rivers are the great shapers of terrestrial landscapes. Very few points on Earth above sea level do not lie within a drainage basin. Even points distant from the nearest channel are likely to be influenced by that channel. Tectonic uplift raises rock thousands of meters above sea level. Precipitation falling on the uplifted terrain concentrates into channels that carry sediment downward to the oceans and influence the steepness of adjacent hill slopes by governing the rate at which the landscape incises. Rivers migrate laterally across lowlands, creating a complex topography of terraces, floodplain wetlands and channels. Subtle differences in elevation, grain size, and soil moisture across this topography control the movement of ground water and the distribution of plants and animals. Rivers in the Landscape, Second Edition, emphasizes general principles and conceptual models, as well as concrete examples of each topic drawn from the extensive literature on river process and form. The book is suitable for use as a course text or a general reference on rivers. Aimed at advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals looking for a concise summary of physical aspects of rivers, Rivers in the Landscape is designed to: emphasize the connectivity between rivers and the greater landscape by explicitly considering the interactions between rivers and tectonics, climate, biota, and human activities; provide a concise summary of the current state of knowledge for physical process and form in rivers; reflect the diversity of river environments, from mountainous, headwater channels to large, lowland, floodplain rivers and from the arctic to the tropics; reflect the diverse methods that scientists use to characterize and understand river process and form, including remote sensing, field measurements, physical experiments, and numerical simulations; reflect the increasing emphasis on quantification in fluvial geomorphology and the study of Earth surfaces in general; provide both an introduction to the classic, foundational papers on each topic, and a guide to the latest, particularly insightful and integrative references.