Novel landforms: integrating people as key drivers of process and form in geomorphology

People alter the earth’s surface in diverse and prolific ways, from enhancing physical and chemical erosion to controlling water transport across drainage networks. These modifications are often faster, more extensive, and wholly novel when compared to natural landscape evolutionary processes. Existing literature largely portrays people as independent of a landscape’s geologic and climatic context. However, we suggest that humans are fundamentally embedded within the geomorphic system. Anthropogenic alteration of the earth’s surface results in landscapes that reflect both the socio-economic-technological settings driven by human need and the underlying climate and geology. Given that human impacts create similar novel combinations of landforms across the world, we suggest an opportunity for focused study of these “novel landforms.” Distinctly anthropogenic landscapes without natural analogues, novel landforms cannot be explained without incorporation of people as an explicit geomorphic process. We propose a unifying framework for the study of novel landforms and demonstrate the opportunities available for more systematic, generalizable research on human-coupled geomorphology.