Amanda H. Schmidt

In my research I try to use a variety of tools to understand why the surface of Earth looks the way that it does. At the biggest scale, I am interested in how we can learn about what forces shape the landscapes that we see today. My research ranges in scale from small-scale projects that are community driven and aim to understand how people interact with their environments to large-scale projects to understand landscape evolution over million-year timescales.

My research is aimed at trying to understand what controls erosion in different parts of the world and over different timescales. I am also interested in understanding how natural and human processes affect the assumptions underlying various tools that we use to measure erosion.

To conduct this research my student and I use a variety of tools including short-lived radionuclides (processed at Oberlin), cosmogenic radionuclides, field work, GIS and remote-sensing based landscape analysis, and Chinese sediment data. I collaborate closely with colleagues at a number of universities in geology, geography, anthropology, urban planning, and forest resources departments.