Global Climate Models predict a change in precipitation in a watershed in California.
How will this affect key watershed properties like sediment yield and fish populations?
A stream restoration project team decides to create a series of natural-looking meander bends in an engineered stream.
Will the bends be stable over time?
Seismic reflection imaging reveals a large sinuous channel buried several hundred meters beneath the deep ocean floor.
Is it a good prospect for oil exploration?
What these questions have in common, apart from being highly relevant to society, is that addressing them requires a sophisticated, cross-disciplinary understanding of the dynamics of the Earth’s surface (the "critical zone"), and in particular, of the channel systems that serve as its arterial network.
The National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics was created to provide this understanding. | 
