Physical landforms and their cultural-environmental relationships have been a core basis for organizing system understanding for many disciplines, such as geography, soil science, and ecology. It is plainly evident that a defining process of urbanization is intentional earthmoving to shape land to support and protect desired land uses and structures. Investigators of urban social-ecological systems have identified and exploited many biological, physical, social, and technical contrasts to advance theory and understanding. However, it is arguably not the case that urban social-ecological systems work has been organized around these created landforms. Therefore, the discipline is lacking a fundamental basis for building knowledge. Harnessing the ecological data revolution, we investigated three city-regions – Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, USA – for emergent landform patterns across parcel-to-continental scales using multiple publicly-available, high-resolution remotely-sensed products combined with model-derived landform elements including slope, hillslope position, and geomorphons.
Results/Conclusions
City-regions were divided into land uses by urbanization density and non-urban uses of agriculture and wildlands. Despite occupying contrasting physiographic settings, relative differences in the representation of landforms elements among regional land uses were common across cities. In suburban land use densities, hillslope positions were oriented around legal boundaries and physical infrastructures, specifically parcels to public rights of way. On-going analyses are examining relationships between landform and land covers such as vegetation and buildings. Collectively, our initial evidence in this work shows strong interrelationships between land use and land cover with landform elements in urbanized landscapes. Thus, we foresee exceptional promise in landforms as a foundational basis for investigations of urban social-ecological systems. As such, theory and understanding of urban landform creation, distribution, and effects on urban social-ecological structure and function are warranted.