The term terrain evaluation has been adopted following the precedent of previous research carried out under the auspices of the Military Engineering Experimental Establishment (Beckett and Webster, 1969).
It has developed in response to the need for an understanding of terrain by an increasing variety of disciplines concerned with its practical uses. These are both scientific, such as geology, hydrology, geography, botany, zoology, ecology, pedology and meteorology; and applied, such as agriculture, forestry, civil and military engineering, and urban and recreational landscape design. This range of interest makes it important to be especially careful about the terms employed. <...>

Уникальное по своей красоте Колыванское озеро – жемчужина предгорий Алтая. В книге приводятся общегеографические сведения об озере и его окрестностях; впервые подробно рассматриваются особенности строения и развития рельефа; обсуждаются гипотезы образования и развития котловины озера и причудливых гранитных останцов на его берегах; анализируются периоды времени появления в озере реликтового растения – водяного ореха; даются сведения об экологическом состоянии озера и сопредельной территории. Отдельная глава посвящена пернатым хищникам окрестностей озера.
Для специалистов в области геологии кайнозоя, геоморфологии, палеогеографиии, экологии, орнитологии, туризма, а также для обучающихся естественнонаучных направлений вузов и просто любознательных читателей.

An understanding of rates of land surface change has always been a central focus of geomorphological research. Among the questions which require a knowledge of rates of change are the following: How important is climate as a control of geomorphological processes? To what extent are humans influencing landform development? What is the potential useful life time of a particular engineering structure? How can environments be transformed by future global environmental changes? What is the relative significance of different geomorphological processes? How much time is required for a particular landform assemblage to develop? <...>

Morphologic attributes of the contemporary geomorphic landscape and its component form elements evolve from the activity of environment-regulated process domains acting in the present, and local and regional-scale process rates governed by conditions external and internal to geomorphic systems. These process–response systems establish landscape characteristics in equilibrium with the movement, storage, and transfer of energy and matter between interrelated and interdependent components of the system. Characteristics of geomorphic landscapes also evolve through time, suggesting that conditions of equilibrium and disequilibrium between opposing forces persist in the process–form adjustment. In certain instances, therefore, landscapes and their constituent landforms inherit the imprint of past process activities, and still others are relics of processes no longer active in the present <...>

Africa is a huge continent covering 30-3 million km2 or about twenty per cent of the earth’s land surface. The continent extends some 8000 km through 72 degrees of latitude from Cape Agulhas in the south (34 51'S) to Cape Blanc in the north (37° 51'N) and its greatest east-west length lies between Ras Hafun (51° 50'E) and Cape Verde (17° 32'W), a distance of 7200 km. Africa has over three-quarters of its area lying within the tropics and one third is affected by wind belts producing arid and semi-arid conditions. <...>

In the winter of 1969 a series of storms in the ‘drylands’ of southern California caused serious soil erosion, numerous landslides, and widespread flooding. Over a hundred people were killed, thousands of homes and other buildings were ruined, the total estimated damage exceeded $200 million, the lives of several million people in the sprawling Los Angeles metropolis were disrupted, and the resources of the community had to be mobilized to cope with the emergency and rehabilitate the region at a cost of well over $8 million (US Corps of Engineers, 1969). The dominant environmental processes responsible for this crisis - erosion, slope failure, and flooding - are geomorphological problems, problems relating to the nature of the land surface and the forces that act upon it. <...>

Оглавление
Предисловие (Н.И.Маккавеев, Р. С. Чалов)
Общие закономерности эрозионных и русловых процессов
работа водных потоков как агент денудации (Н.И. Маккавеев)
Взаимная связь процессов эрбзии и аккумуляции (Н.И.Маккавеев)
Процессы эрозии и денудации на водосборах и развитие речных русел (Н.И.Маккавеев, Р.С. Чалов)
Гидравлическая типизация эрозионного процесса (Н.И.Маккавеев)
Общие закономерности эрозионных и русловых процессов (Н. И. Маккавеев)

Theories of landscape development serve to stimulate communication between the interdependent descriptive, genetic-historical, and process-oriented lines of inquiry in geomorphology, and thereby help to unify them into one science. The theory that has dominated the modern era of geomorphology, which may be said to have begun in 1877 with the publication of G. K. Gilbert’s “Land Sculpture”, was first formulated by W. M. Davis in 1889 and 1899.

The term "soil" has many definitions, depending upon who is using the term. For example, to engineers "soil" is unconsolidated surficial material, whereas to many soil scientists it is mainly the medium for plant growth. A definition of soil that serves our purpose well is a slight modification of that given by Joffe'": a soil is described as a natural body consisting of layers or horizons of mineral and/or organic constituents of variable thicknesses, which differ from the parent material in their morphological, physical, chemical, and mineralogical properties and their biological characteristics; at least some of these properties are pedogenic (Fig. 1-1). Soil horizons generally are unconsolidated, but some contain sufficient amounts of silica, carbonates, or iron oxides to be cemented <...>

This introduction highlights the practical application of geomorphology and geomorpho-logical hydrology to environmental management through four major themes: ground instability and land management, the effect of land use on the hydrological response of geomorphological systems, geomorphological aspects of environmental impact and risk, and aspects of the modelling and management of geomorphological systems undergoing environmental change. The chapter sets the volume of contributions in the context of changing environments and human impact, and brings attention to the scale problem in geomorphological research. It outlines issues and strategies of land management, and comments briefly on the prospects for “environmental geomorphology”. <...>