This study contains essays which address the way in which landscape and landforms respond to external changes, an important issue not only for understanding landform development, but also crucial to an appreciation of the social and environmental response to the landscape.

This volume is the outcome of the British Geomorphological Research Group (BGRG) sessions at the Annual Conference of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) held at the University of Sheffield in January 1991. The theme of the BGRG sessions, landscape sensitivity, was selected for two main reasons: first, in an attempt to address an important issue in studies of geomorphology and environmental change; and second, to provide a conference topic that crossed the thematic boundaries in geomorphology and therefore appealed to a wide audience. The presentations were divided amongst four groups that reflected the ways in which presenters had interpreted the sensitivity issue or the manner in which sensitivity could be best addressed or understood in a geomorphological context: modelling landscape sensitivity, catchment scale sensitivity, sensitivity to human disturbance, and geomorphological processes, landscape sensitivity and climatic change. Sixteen of the chapters in this book began life as presentations at Sheffield. The remaining chapters were not submitted for presentation at Sheffield but were subsequently supplied in manuscript form. This has contributed to the organization of the book differing from that of the conference, with chapters divided over three sensitivity sections. The first relates landscape sensitivity to geomorphic processes and climatic change, including overviews, case studies and modelling, the second concerns sensitivity in relation to agricultural and pastoral land use issues, and the third contains two chapters that deal with sensitivity in relation to built environments.