Integrating climate and local factors for geomorphological distribution models

• Published in: Earth Surface Processes and Landforms
• Main Authors: Aalto, Juha, Luoto, Miska
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2014
• Subjects: palsa
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/esp.3554; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2Fesp.3554; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/esp.3554

ABSTRACT Earth surface processes (ESPs) drive landscape development and ecosystem processes in high‐latitude regions by creating spatially heterogeneous abiotic and biotic conditions. Ongoing global change may potentially alter the activity of ESPs through feedback on ground conditions, vegetation and the carbon cycle. Consequently, accurate modeling of ESPs is important for improving understanding of the current and future distributions of these processes. The aims of this study were to: (1) integrate climate and multiple local predictors to develop realistic ensemble models for the four key ESPs occurring at high latitudes (slope processes, cryoturbation, nivation and palsa mires) based on the outputs of 10 modern statistical techniques; (2) test whether models of ESPs are improved by incorporating topography, soil and vegetation predictors to climate‐only models; (3) examine the relative importance of these variables in a multivariate setting. Overall, the models showed high transferability with the mean area under curve of a receiver operating characteristics (AUC) ranging from 0.83 to 0.96 and true skill statistics (TSS) from 0.52 to 0.87 for the most complex models. Even though the analyses highlighted the importance of the climate variables as the most influential predictors, three out of four models benefitted from the inclusion of local predictors. We conclude that disregarding local topography and soil conditions in spatial models of ESPs may cause a significant source of error in geomorphological distribution models. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.