Map packaging artwork We've been hard at work finishing our trail map for the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and surrounding area. This project is an update of our first Gap trail map. We're hoping to have the maps in stock by Memorial Day, 2017. Our new map is on a larger sheet size (39" x 13.35" divided into two sheets for convenient use) and at a scale of one-inch to a half-mile. Please explore the drafts via links below and let us know if you have any suggestions.

Artwork drafts

Map side: https://outragegis.com/gap/map Elevation profile side: https://outragegis.com/gap/legend Map packaging artwork: https://outragegis.com/gap/cover    

The biogeomorphic impacts of organisms may differ at different stages in the development of landforms, ecosystems, or the individual organisms. I was thinking about this recently here along the shoreline bluffs of the Neuse River estuary, North Carolina, where I have been both looking at some soil profiles and enjoying the coastline.

There are at least five distinctly different biogeomorphic roles trees play along this shoreline--many more if you wanted to get more specific within these categories. The specifics are probably of only limited applicability elsewhere, but the general principle--multiple effects, which vary at different stages of both landform and vegetation development--is widely valid.

Trees and other vegetation grow thick and fast in this moist subtropical climate.

Stage 1A Surface Bioprotection

Trees (including canopy, roots, and litter) protect the ground surface from erosion and add organic matter to soil.

This spot where a tree was recently removed shows the local deepening of the soil (compare to sedimentary layering preserved adjacent) associated with a mature tree.

In studies of soil formation and landscape evolution, we often think in terms of a (over-) simplified "conveyor belt" model, where bedrock is weathered to create the raw material for soil formation at the base. Further up toward the ground surface, this weathered rock is progressively modified into soil. Thus, as you go from the base of the soil or weathering profile, material gets progressively more modified, and (in terms of soil rather than rock), older.

Anyone who's spent time in more than a few soil pits or road cuts knows that the conveyor belt is, at best, a loose approximation and often hardly applicable at all. Variations in properties of the rock or parent material, dynamical instabilities and positive feedbacks in weathering and other pedogenetic processes work in many cases to create increasingly variable and heterogeneous (both vertically and horizontally) regoliths over time. Critical processes operate in all directions (not just vertically), and moisture fluxes and biological activity follow preferential, self-reinforcing paths. Further, mass is added not just from weathering, but from deposition and organic matter, and removed by erosion, leaching, fire, and decomposition.

The attached paper (In Defense of Metanarratives:Extremal Principles, Optimality and Selection in Earth Surface Systems) was originally written in early 2015 and revised in April 2015, as an invited paper for a special issue of a geography journal. By mutual agreement with the guest editors, I withdrew the paper after deciding that I was unwilling/unable to satisfy some of the major recommendations of reviewers. The major, but by no means only, issues were that referees and guest editors felt I should more fully address history and philosophy of science issues and parse the definitions of principles, theories, narratives, etc. I felt that I could say what I was trying to say without getting into that stuff, which would have taken a lot of work on my part that would have seriously inhibited my studies on the (to me) far more interesting and important topics of how Earth surface systems actually work. After sitting on it for two years, and publishing bits and pieces of the ideas on optimality and selection in other contexts (but not the metanarratives part) I concluded that I am unlikely to ever resubmit it anywhere. But I did put a lot of work into writing the damn thing, so I am posting it online, for what it is worth.