River networks carve Earth’s surface into ridges and valleys and are conduits for sediment, water, nutrients, and organisms. Rivers can change in elevation by eroding their beds, but erosion can also generate planform change in river networks, with basins changing shape and size as divides move either through gradual migration or discrete river capture. The topology and geometry of river basins is shaped by external forcing (e.g., climate and tectonics) as well as internal dynamics such as lateral channel migration, landslides, or geological structures.

This session invites contributions that explore any aspect of river basin evolution, including studies that reconstruct paleo-river basins, investigate drivers of river basin evolution, or illustrate the implications of river basin dynamics for other Earth systems (e.g. sedimentary record, biological evolution). We welcome submissions from any disciplinary perspective, over any time and space scales, that use approaches ranging from field data to experimental or numerical modeling.