Drainage basin morphometry

The increasing rate of geographical publication has confronted contemporary geographers with a voluminous literature. Familiarity with increasing amounts of relevant material is particularly crucial when geography is struggling to reconcile greater internal specialization and differentiation with growing demands for applied solutions to integrated problems. The remorseless ’information explosion’ apparent in geography (Stoddart, 1967) manifests itself on at least three subsidiary levels. In geomorphology the breadth and depth of literature available in the 1960s necessitated the production of a bibliography of British Geomorphology (Clayton, 1964), and Geomorphological Abstracts (later to become Geographical Abstracts); within geomorphology, 1973 was found an appropriate time for publication of a comprehensive 928 item review of drainage basin studies (Gregory and Walling, 1973), whilst within fluvial geomorphology methods of drainage basin morphometric analysis have been reviewed and assessed (Gardiner, 1975). Stream morphometry has become a fundamental focal point of much post-war geomorphological research in the United