Interactive landscape: CCZO

My PhD research site was the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory in South Carolina. It is situated in the Southern Piedmont with soils and hillslopes that had been stabilized and protected from erosion by thick forest cover for millennia prior to widespread European arrival in the 1700's. This, combined with the fact that glaciers never reached this far south have resulted in a "mature" landscape which has a dense network of many stream valleys. While much attention has been devoted to the study of these stream networks however, I am incredibly interested in how the landsurface terrain network of interfluves (hill-tops) structure this environment. An interactive diagram of this interfluvial network is below with interfluve lines colored according to Horton-Strahler stream ordering rules.

Click and hold down left/right click and move your mouse to rotate and move around the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory landscape terrain. The color-coded lines represent the topographic network and landscape structure of CCZO with cooler colored parts of the network having a ranking value of 1 and increasing in rank to red being rank 5. Use scroll wheel or gesture to zoom in/out. Left click on a location to get the UTM coordinates (two numbers) as well as the elevation (m) at that location. Consider the nature of the terrain breadth, elevation, and steepness as it corresponds to different topographic network rankings.