Professor Willgoose is recognized for outstanding intellectual leadership in the modeling of landform evolution, dynamics, and related processes. Professor Willgoose helped establish the modern discipline of computational modeling of landscape evolution, demonstrating that the physics of geomorphic processes and their interaction with climate, hydrology, and tectonics are directly reflected in the topographic structure of river basins, and can be quantified the now-famous slope-area relationship and related metrics. He further demonstrated that landscape and soilscape evolution models can be applied to critical engineering challenges related to mining and hazardous-waste containment, and that the key unknowns can be discovered and quantified through field monitoring, digital terrain analysis, and laboratory and field experiments. His innovative research has illuminated the critical role of processes such as physical weathering and armoring, and yielded new insights into how those processes can be understood and modeled. His book ‘Principles of Soilscape and Landscape Evolution’ (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a tour-de-force on the co-evolution of topography, soils, soil moisture, vegetation, climate, and tectonics, and how that co-evolution can be modeled computationally. Garry Willgoose is a Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and a former Fellow of the Australian Research Council.
