From experimental plots to experimental landscapes: topography, erosion and deposition in sub-humid badlands from Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry

In the last decade advances in surveying technology have opened up the possibility of representing topography and monitoring surface changes over experimental plots (<10 m2) in high resolution (~103 points m-1). Yet the representativeness of these small plots is limited. With ‘Structure-from-Motion’ (SfM) and ‘Multi-View Stereo’ (MVS) techniques now becoming part of the geomorphologist's toolkit, there is potential to expand further the scale at which we characterise topography and monitor geomorphic change morphometrically. Moving beyond previous plot-scale work using Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) surveys, this paper validates robustly a number of SfM-MVS surveys against total station and extensive TLS data at three nested scales: plots (