Attempts at qualitative and quantitative assessment of human impact on the landscape

Abstract

During the past 50 years several approaches to anthropogeomorphology have been developed. The geomorphological approach is to study magnitude and rate of anthropogeomorphological processes; the socioeconomic approach examines the economic and social influences on the dynamics of human geomorphological activity and the historical approach traces changes of human impact on geomorphological processes over time. Despite of the more and more intensive research, however, there is no widely accepted anthropogeomorphological synthesis, although some seminal publications have appeared in this topic. This paper reviews and discusses the principal publications on the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of human impact on Earth’s surface.