Topography/Relief

Valley

Plain

Slope

Top of hill or ridge

Other

Valley

 

A valley is a hollow or surface depression of the earth bounded by hills or mountains, a natural trough in the earth's surface, that slopes down to a stream, lake or the ocean, formed by water and/or ice erosion. The form of a valley depends upon the rate at which deepening and widening goes on. V-shaped valleys are caused by forces such as erosion and rivers. Valleys that are not V-shaped were formerly occupied by glaciers and are characteristically U-shaped, formed by the huge bodies of ice that moved along. 

Valley

Valley types. Source: Freie Universität Berlin

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Plain

Plains and plateaus are broad, nearly level stretches of land that have no great changes in elevation. Plains are generally lower than the land around them; they may be found along a coast or inland. A plateau is a large highland area of fairly level land separated from surrounding land by steep slopes.

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Slope

The Earth's slopes can be classified as three types according to their shape: straight slopes, concave slopes, and convex slopes. A slope consists of the three parts crest, free face, and talus slope.

Slope

Profile of a slope. Source: SA Geography.

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Top of hill or ridge

The top line of a hill or ridge is also called crest (see picture above: A).

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Other

Landforms to which these definitions do not apply.

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Protocols and good practices
Good and consistent working protocols and practices create the base for a successful usage of the data by a data management system.
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Useful Geospatial Layers produced by the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (GTN-P) or related to permafrost studies. We provide the downloads as different file types.
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Overview on international monitoring components (CALM, TSP) managed within the GTN-P database and global monitoring systems (DUE Permafrost, FLUXNET, INTERACT).

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