This award is to defray participant costs for a short course that will describe recently developed methodologies for quantifying landscape form for tectonic and geomorphic investigations. The course will be held at the University of Colorado, in conjunction with the 2007 GSA Annual Meeting in Denver. Participants in the course will become familiar with a set of integrated ArcGIS/Matlab software tools that have been developed and improved over the past decade. This set of geomorphic tools has already demonstrated considerable promise for locating unmapped fault zones, characterizing the transient response of landscapes to tectonic forcing, and understanding the feedbacks between climate and tectonics at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Distributing this software to the broader geomorphology and tectonics communities has a number of tangible benefits. First, the dissemination of these efficient computer algorithms has the potential to accelerate the pace of discovery in each of these fields. Second, the short course will continue to improve the bridge between the disciplines of geomorphology and tectonics, while hopefully forging collaborations among varied research groups. And third, the course will provide a venue for participants to share ideas for new applications of quantitative geomorphic analysis, and for potential improvements to the methodologies currently employed.
Broader Impacts: The fundamental goal of this short course is to improve teaching, training and learning by bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds and affiliations. PI and co-conveners will set aside spaces in the course for graduate students and faculty from undergraduate institutions, to ensure that participants come from varied educational backgrounds. By splitting the course enrollment among faculty and students, PI hopes that learning will continue into classrooms at participants'' home institutions, ensuring broad dissemination of the course material. Course materials, including computer codes for extracting and interpreting topographic metrics from raw digital data, will also be made available online following the course. These materials will be available both to participants and to the broader community, ensuring that the methodologies are disseminated to as large a group as possible. By bringing together scientists from a variety of backgrounds, PI also anticipates that new collaborations will be forged, thereby enhancing infrastructure for research and education.
