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K-State Today

April 21, 2021

Langston is co-author in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article

Submitted by Malorie Sougey

Abigail Langston, fluvial geomorphologist and assistant professor of geography and geospatial sciences, is the second author on a new article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is one of the world's most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,500 research papers annually.

The article, "The role of lateral erosion in the evolution of nondendritic drainage networks to dendricity and the persistence of dynamic networks," is authored, in addition to Langston, by Jeffrey Kwang of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Gary Parker of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

Most of Earth's landscapes are dissected by rivers that organize themselves into dendritic — tree-like — networks. The shape and organization of river networks determine how and where water and sediment are routed on Earth. To date, models of river network formation, named landscape evolution models, are unable to explain how nondendritic networks evolve into strongly branching systems. In this newly published article, Langston and her co-authors capture this evolution utilizing a model that incorporates how rivers erode in the lateral direction.

See the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne's news release.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide.

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