doc.funds Alpine geo- and biodiversity during environmental changes

This project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for a period of four years. The doctoral programme will start in October 2025.

>>> Open PhD positions and information on the programme <<<

In the doctoral programme, 10 doctoral students will have the opportunity to explore the interaction of biotic and abiotic processes in the Alps. Coordinated by Prof. Stefan Dötterl and building on the Dynamite 2 doctoral school, the interdisciplinary project is supervised by more than 20 faculty members from the University of Salzburg.

I am looking forward to working with a new doctoral student on the sub-project ‘Landscape response to a changing climate in the Eastern Alps: Analysing Big Data for past, present, and future conditions’.

Dynamic Mountain Environments & Society Vol. 2

Project Funded

 Movemont.at

The research project is funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences from November 2022 to April 2026. It involves the University of Graz, the University of Salzburg, the three Austrian UNESCO Global Geoparks, and various international partners.

The movemont.at project aims at exploring the role of landslides as geosystem services, with a particular focus on environmental education at the three Austrian UNESCO Global Geoparks.

Stresses in mountain ranges under dead load are computed with a novel numerical approach and presented by means of VR - goggles in the visitor centers of the UNESCO Global Geoparks

Project Funded

ELEvATE: Elevated Low Relief LandscapEs in Mountain Belts: Active Tectonics or Glacial REshaping? The Eastern Alps as Natural Laboratory.

Here you find the abstract of the Research Proposal!

This project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the government of Salzburg for a period of three years.  After a one-year extension, the research project concluded with a series of high-profile publications in 2023. Several articles with exciting data (burial ages of cave sediments) are still in the publication pipeline.

Selected recent studies

Old orogen – young topography: lithological contrasts controlling erosion and relief formation in the Bohemian Massif (Earth surface dynamics under review)

Robl, J.,  Dremel F., Stüwe K., Hergarten S., von Hagke C. and D. Fabel

In several low mountain ranges throughout Europe, high-grade metamorphic and granitic rocks of the Variscan orogen are exposed – even though the topography of this Paleozoic mountain range was largely leveled during the Permian and later covered by sediments.The Bohemian Massif is one of these low mountain ranges and consists of high-grade metamorphic and magmatic rocks that dip southward below the weakly consolidated Neogene sediments of the Alpine Molasse Basin. To constrain landscape change and its rate, we used the concentration of cosmogenic 10Be in river sands to determine 20 catchment-wide erosion rates and correlated these with topographic metrics characterizing both the hillslopes and the drainage systems. Erosion rates range from 22 to 51 m per million years, which is generally low compared to tectonically active mountain ranges such as the Alps. We interpret the measured erosion rates and related topographic patterns as the landscape response to slow and large-scale uplift in concert with strong variations in bedrock erodibility between rocks of the Bohemian Massif and the Neogene Molasse basin. We propose that lithology is ultimately responsible for the topographic difference between the mountainous Bohemian Massif and the low-relief Molasse zone despite a common uplift history during the last few million years.

The linear feedback precipitation model (LFPM) - a simple and efficient model for orographic precipitation in the context of landform evolution modeling

Hergarten S. and J. Robl

The influence of climate on landform evolution has attracted great interest over the past decades. While many studies aim at determining erosion rates or parameters of erosion models, feedbacks between tectonics, climate, and landform evolution have been discussed but addressed quantitatively only in a few modeling studies. One of the problems in this field is that coupling a large-scale landform evolution model with a regional climate model would dramatically increase the theoretical and numerical complexity. Only a few simple models have been made available so far that allow efficient numerical coupling between topography-controlled precipitation and erosion.

This paper fills this gap by introducing a quite simple approach involving two vertically integrated moisture components (vapor and cloud water). The interaction between the two components is linear and depends on altitude. This model structure is in principle the simplest approach that is able to predict both orographic precipitation at small scales and a large-scale decrease in precipitation over continental areas without introducing additional assumptions. Even in combination with transversal dispersion and elevation-dependent evapotranspiration, the model is of linear time complexity and increases the computing effort of efficient large-scale landform evolution models only moderately. Simple numerical experiments applying such a coupled landform evolution model show the strong impact of spatial precipitation gradients on mountain range geometry including steepness and peak elevation, position of the principal drainage divide, and drainage network properties.

Read the entire study!

MOVIES: Impact of model parameters on the Precipitation Pattern | India-Asia

MOVIES: Co-Evolution of Precipiation and Topographie

See also Stefan Hergartens openlem page: http://hergarten.at/openlem/ and learn to apply this fascinating code to different questions of landscape evolution: http://hergarten.at/openlem/firstexample/

Recent Study (GMD 2023)

Modeling large-scale landform evolution with a stream power law
for glacial erosion (OpenLEM v37): benchmarking experiments
against a more process-based description of ice flow (iSOSIA v3.4.3)

Liebl M., Robl J., Hergarten S., Egholm D.L. and K. Stüwe

Read the entire study!

Following the tradition of modeling fluvial landscape evolution, a novel approach describing glacial erosion based on an empirical stream power law was proposed. This approach differs substantially from well established process-based models applied to describe glacial erosion in mountain landscapes. Outstanding computational performance but a number of potential limitations compared to process-based models requires extensive testing to evaluate the applicability of this novel approach. In this study, we test the validity of the glacial stream power law and its implementation into a 2-D landform evolution model (OpenLEM) by benchmarking it against a state of the art surface process model based on the integrated second order shallow-ice approximation (iSOSIA).

We found that the glacial stream power approach cannot replace process-based models such as iSOSIA, but is complementary to them by addressing research questions that could not previously be answered due to a lack of computational efficiency. The implementation of the glacial stream power law is primarily suitable for large-scale simulations investigating the evolution of mountain topography in the interplay of tectonics and climate. As coupling glacial and fluvial erosion with sediment transport shows nearly the same computationally efficiency as its purely fluvial counterpart, mountain range scale simulations at high spatial resolution are not exclusively restricted to the fluvial domain anymore and a series of exciting research questions can be attacked by this novel approach.

Controls on the formation and size of potential landslide dams and dammed lakes in the Austrian Alps

Argentin A-L., Robl J., Prasicek G., Hergarten S., Hölbling D., Abad L. and Z. Dabiri

Controls on landsliding have long been studied, but the potential for landslide-induced dam and lake formation has received less attention. Here, we model possible landslides and the formation of landslide dams and lakes in the Austrian Alps. We combine a slope criterion with a probabilistic approach to determine landslide release areas and volumes. We then simulate the progression and deposition of the landslides with a fluid dynamic model. We characterize the resulting landslide deposits with commonly used metrics, investigate their relation to glacial land-forming and tectonic units, and discuss the roles of the drainage system and valley shape. We discover that modeled landslide dams and lakes cover a wide volume range. In line with real-world inventories, we further found that lake volume increases linearly with landslide volume in the case of efficient damming – when an exceptionally large lake is dammed by a relatively small landslide deposit. The distribution and size of potential landslide dams and lakes depends strongly on local topographic relief. For a given landslide volume, lake size depends on drainage area and valley geometry. The largest lakes form in glacial troughs, while the most efficient damming occurs where landslides block a gorge downstream of a wide valley, a situation preferentially encountered at the transition between two different tectonic units. Our results also contain inefficient damming events, a damming type that exhibits different scaling of landslide and lake metrics than efficient damming and is hardly reported in inventories. We assume that such events also occur in the real world and emphasize that their documentation is needed to better understand the effects of landsliding on the drainage system.

Teaching

There is no modern academic teaching without research!  Therefore, fundamentals and new scientific findings are presented in the following lessons: Bachelor Level Introduction to the Basics of Geology Introduction to General and Applied Geology Geographic Information Systems for Geologists Introduction to Numerical Modeling in Geology Scientific Writing Excursion: Eastern Alps Tectonic Geomorphology Master Level Remote Sensing for Geologists Applied Numerical Methods in Geology Geodynamics Natural Hazards and Geotechnical Solutions PhD Level Data and Figures Aspects of Landscape Evolution Teacher Training  Biology and environmental studies Bioplanet Earth Biology as a science of life (lecture series)

Until now all lessons are held in German and you will find further informations here

Latest Publications

Gradwohl, G., Stüwe, K., Liebl, M., Robl, J., Plan, L., and Rummler, L., 2024, The elevated low-relief landscapes of the Eastern Alps: Geomorphology, v. 458.

Argentin, A.-L., Prasicek, G., Robl, J., Hergarten, S., Hölbling, D., Abad, L., and Dabiri, Z., 2023, The scaling of landslide-dammed lakes: Global and Planetary Change, v. 228.

Duan, M., Neubauer, F., Robl, J. C., Zhou, X., Liebl, M., Argentin, A.-L. M., Dong, Y., Cheng, C., Zhang, B., Boekhout, F., and Bedoya Gonzalez, D. A., 2023, Northeastward expansion of the Tibetan Plateau: Topographic evidence from the North Qinling Mts. - Weihe Graben Coupling system, Central China: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 623, no. 6223.

Liebl, M., Robl, J., Hergarten, S., Egholm, D. L., and Stüwe, K., 2023, Modeling large-scale-landform evolution with a stream power law for glacial erosion (OpenLEM v37): benchmarking experiments against a more process-based description of ice flow (iSOSIA v3.4.3): Geosci. Model Dev., v. 16, no. 4, p. 1315-1343.

Turab, S. A., Stüwe, K., Stuart, F. M., Cogne, N., Chew, D. M., and Robl, J., 2023, A two phase escarpment evolution of the Red Sea margin of southwestern Saudi Arabia: Insights from low-temperature apatite thermochronology, v. 603.

Wetzlinger, K., Robl, J., Liebl, M., Dremel, F., Stüwe, K., and von Hagke, C., 2023, Old orogen – young topography: Evidence for relief rejuvenation in the Bohemian Massif: Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences, v. 116, no. 1, p. 17-38.

Full List of Publications

More publications are in the pipeline ...