MATLAB Seminar: Mapping Bankfull Geometry with MATLAB
The BankfullMapper is a MATLAB and TopoToolbox-based software that let’s you delineate the height and extent of bankfull flow based on high-resolution topographic data. There are two blog posts that provide details and examples (BankfullMapper: a semi-automated MATLAB tool on high-resolution Digital Terrain Models for spatio-temporal monitoring of bankfull geometry and discharge and BankfullMapper – here’s how it works). In an upcoming MATLAB seminar on Feb 25, 2026, Michele Delchiaro will provide an introduction and demonstration of the tool. If you are interested in terrain analysis and hydrology, this might be an event that you should not miss.
Post-doctoral Position in Geomorphology, Landscape Evolution, and Remote Sensing Focusing on Landslide Dynamics
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all have a great, enjoyable and healthy year. If you are up for some new position, here’s an interesting one opened by Sumit Das who works at the Charles University, Prague. Please check the job advertisement below.
Climate change, glacial lake outburst floods and infrastructure on the eastern Tibetan Plateau
This post is written by Bingshu Xu and Linfeng Fan, both at the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Thanks for inviting me to participate in this study, and for contributing to the TopoToolbox blog.
The eastern Tibetan Plateau is a global hotspot for glaciers and glacial lakes. With climate warming, glaciers on the eastern Tibetan Plateau continue to retreat and thousands of glacial lakes are expanding, increasing the risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). GLOFs can release vast volumes of water within hours, generating flood peaks exceeding those of meteorological floods by far, thereby posing severe threats to major infrastructures such as the Sichuan–Tibet Railway, which has been acknowledged as the most challenging high-altitude transport construction project of the 21st century.
Read the rest of this entry »Open PhD Position (75%, 3 years) in Landslide Research
The Geohazards Group at the University of Potsdam is offering a three-year PhD position (TV-L E13, 75% of DFG personnel rate) to carry out research on Large Landslides, Climate Trends, and Anomalies. The candidate will be part of the Geohazards Group, and funded by the forthcoming DFG project LINDA, which explores whether and how large landslides have been responding to contemporary atmospheric warming in terms of their size, frequency, and reporting. The project will make use of landslide catalogues, high-resolution satellite image time series, climate reanalysis data, and probabilistic models to detect and estimate the effects of climate change on sudden, large slope failures. We are looking for doctoral candidates with a Masters degree in the Earth and Environmental Sciences or related disciplines, and strong quantitative skills, preferably with some experience in using R or Python, remote sensing, slope stability, or data science. Being able to handle large and heterogeneous datasets is a further asset. For further information about this position please contact Prof. Oliver Korup (oliver.korup@geo.uni-potsdam.de) before 15 December 2025. The University of Potsdam is an equal opportunity employer.
Miss no updates anymore
Did you already switch to TopoToolbox 3? If not, I recommend you to do so. TT2 issues many warnings in newer versions of MATLAB, which doesn’t give you a nice experience. However, once you switch to TT3, you will note that we are putting quite some work into the development as part of our DFG-funded project, which results in frequent new releases (Fig. 1). Keeping track of these can be bothersome, in particular if you are using MATLAB’s add-on manager to install or uninstall TT which I recommend (alternatively, you can use git and compile libtopotoolbox yourself). To make things easier, I’ve now written a new tool that let’s you update your TopoToolbox add-on from the command line.
Read the rest of this entry »PhD position – Oceanic island insights into river-driven volcano landscape evolution
This is a job advertisement by John Hillier. Ramón Casillas Ruiz and I will co-supervise this project. Please find more detailed information here. Note that applications must be submitted by 23:59 GMT on Wednesday 7th January 2026.
Volcanic islands are exciting and useful real-world climate and landscape laboratories. When geologically young (<10Ma) they provide a simplified and spatially limited setting for testing landscape evolution theories and models. This project aims to develop new insights into how bedrock incision processes interact with geological and climatic factors (i.e. spatially variable uplift, shield building, mega-landslides, orographic rainfall effects and extremes), using the volcanic island of Tenerife as a case study.
Read the rest of this entry »Drainage reorganization in the Danube and Rhine basins
Drainage basins are dynamic features of the Earth surface. The area of drainage basins is controlled by the longterm interaction of tectonic forces and surface processes, but is at the same time constrained by the available surface area, e.g. of an island or a continent. Drainage basins thus compete for space against each other, which can lead to interesting feedbacks of drainage basin changes and surface processes.
Read the rest of this entry »Color functions in TopoToolbox
Welcome back to the TopoToolbox blog. If you are a loyal reader of the blog, you will have noted that I like creating nice graphics and maps. One important ingredient of nice graphics is the clever use of colors. Hence, TopoToolbox features some functions that provide access to different colormaps. You’ll find these in the folder colormaps. The folder also contains a bunch of other functions that you may be not aware of. Hence, this post is about these functions.
GraphFlood in TopoToolbox
I have featured GraphFlood before (and here), but now it’s finally time to write about its MATLAB implementation. We had a very productive mini-hackathon today and one of the results is a binding to GraphFlood (Gailleton et al., 2024) which is written in C++ and part of libtopotoolbox. Another outcome of our coding session is a much faster implementation of hillshade which may speed up imageschs, your favorite function to plot DEMs. But I may cover that in another post soon.
Read the rest of this entry »Map-coloring in TopoToolbox
Do you know the map-coloring problem? Well, this is a classic challenge in mathematics and computer science that involves assigning colors to regions on a map so that no adjacent regions share the same color. The goal is to use the minimum number of colors possible while ensuring that neighboring areas remain distinguishable. This problem is most famously associated with the Four Color Theorem, which states that four colors are sufficient to color any planar map in this way. Now how does this relate to TopoToolbox?
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