The topographic state of fluvially conditioned mountain ranges

In real world orogens, we find evidence for premature, mature and decaying topography as well as relief rejuvenation by analysing slope-elevation distributions and trace the expression of crustal strain distorting drainage networks by applying the χ transform. We conclude that modern concepts of landscape evolution allow sophisticated analyses of real-world orogens, but emphasize that unambiguous results are mostly derived from regions dominated by a limited number of interacting processes such as mountain ranges with limited or no glacial imprint. This results in a high demand for techniques to disentangle the complex topography of real-world orogens into the signals resulting from the individual land-shaping processes.