 I'm Brad Murray. I chair the steering committee for the surface dynamics modeling system, and it is my great pleasure to give a formal opening to this year's annual meeting. This year's theme, I think, is a really critical one. Landscapes and ecosystems, well, virtually every landscape or seascape has an associated ecosystem, and many ecosystems have associated landscapes or seascapes. And for most of the history of Earth's surface sciences, we've treated these as separate things, or at least at most we've considered them as connected through boundary conditions. Thinking of a hill slope example, the slope and elevation and microclimate that the landscape imposes on the local ecosystem, you can think of that as just a boundary condition for that ecosystem and the dynamics of that ecosystem play out within that stage. And going the other direction, we've for many decades considered some of the influences of vegetation or animals on flow and sediment transport in Earth's surface systems. But usually we've treated that as vegetation effects as part of the boundary condition, or at most effects on sort of static effects on forcing conditions. But really, the dynamics of ecosystems and landscapes or seascapes are dynamically coupled, at least over long enough timescales. They're thoroughly intertwined. And it turns out we can't study the evolution of an ecosystem or the evolution of a landscape separately. It just wouldn't work. And this has implications, or at least it wouldn't be relevant to the natural systems. This has implications for how we study responses of Earth's environments to changing climate and changing sea level rise rates. Now this thorough dynamic coupling, I think, first became obvious in river and coastal environments, where the time scales of change are short enough that humans can see things changing. And it makes it a little more obvious how coupled the dynamics of ecosystems and landscapes are. And as one example that we're going to hear about some aspects of, at least in one of our key notes, which I'm looking forward to, coastal marshes. You can think about, if you come at it from the point of view of the marsh grass ecosystem, that ecosystem couldn't exist without having a sediment platform that's sufficiently high in the tidal frame for the grasses to develop on and for that ecosystem to develop on. On the other hand, that ecosystem, that sediment platform wouldn't develop if it weren't for the grasses or the mangroves or the microfiber bentos. The ecosystem and the landscape evolution go hand in hand. And that has implications then for disturbances of the ecosystem, either physical processes, storms or other many other processes that can disturb the ecosystem, which then can cause the disappearance of the sediment platform. And so we can see this happening in real time. In that example, especially in degrading marshes as sea level rise rates increase. Now, on the other end of the end member of timescales mountain ranges, you might think are less thoroughly coupled. But there's some really cool work that I think we're going to see some of in a different keynote today as well that suggests that on long enough timescales, ecosystems, landscapes are just as coupled in mountain range on mountain range scales. There's cool work showing that if we didn't have vegetation on mountain ranges, maybe thinking back into history before land plants developed, mountain ranges would be considerably lower and different shape differently than the ones we see that are vegetation covered. And going a step further, when you take into account the effects of physical processes on the ecosystem, so there's populations within the ecosystem that are developing as conditions allow, but then also being destroyed by physical processes in the mountain case by landslides when the mountain gets sufficiently steep. Is that taking into account that thorough coupling of the dynamics both ways the physical processes affecting the ecological and vice versa, we see yet again a significant change in the model form and size of mountain ranges. So if it's true for mountain ranges, it's true for things that change on the storm timescale. It's probably true for virtually all landscapes and ecosystems, I believe. And these interactions extend not just at the surface, but all the way down through the soil column, the critical zone, and through the water column. They also involve not just water and sediment fluxes, but fluxes of nutrients and carbon and other critically important things. And so I think Earth's surface science has a long way to go to thoroughly take into account these these ecosystems and landscape dynamic couplings, but we are clearly moving in that direction these days and I'm very glad that we have that this important