Investigating the role of climate change during the late Pleistocene on landscape evolution: a case study from New Mexico, USA

This study examines the role of climate change during the late Pleistocene-Holocene transition on landscape morphology in a semi-arid basin in central New Mexico through a modeling experiment, corroborated with field observations. In central New Mexico transition from a wetter and cooler climate to recent drier and warmer climate have led to changes in vegetation types from forests dominated in low elevations to shrubs and grasses. Such vegetation changes with the intensification of monsoon caused significant increase in regional erosion rates. In order to reveal the influence of vegetation change on erosion dynamics, we use the CHILD landscape evolution model with moisture-dependent vegetation growth functions and accounting for the impacts of spatial distribution of solar radiation. Pleistocene-Holocene transition is represented by a sinusoidal function for annual precipitation. Potential evapotranspiration is estimated in relation to annual precipitation based on regionally constructed relationships. We used the model to investigate how the water and energy-driven vegetation dynamics impact the tempo of landscape evolution and identify the factors that lead to the observed landscape morphology in the region.