Landforms are the physical basis upon which life is organized at the Earth's surface. This affirmation includes the human use of the geographic space, but must not be used to ascertain any deterministic control upon human activities, which can even create artificial bases for its existence, such as the modern cities. This human capacity to control the environment does not preclude the fact that geomorphologic features identified and mapped for a specific area, taken as "homogeneous" or "isotropic" units, can be used as a logical platform to infer about the variability of other co-incident environmental characteristics.
It is reasonable to imagine that through a careful and exhaustive survey of the present-day locational co-incidences between landforms and vegetation covers, is possible to foresee, for instance, preferential paths for the creation of forest regeneration corridors along devastated areas. Thus, the natural locational associations of vegetation types and landforms registered today do teach us about how to select and conduct future environmental recovering measures.
The considerations above have their theoretic (and pragmatic) basis on the concept of GEODIVERSITY and its relationships with Geomorphology. GEODIVERSITY is the expression of the variability of environmental characteristics found in a geographic area. This robust concept can be made operational, i.e., turned into a rewarding environmental investigation procedure, through massive use of geoprocessing techniques upon geocoded databases containing multiple types of environmental information. In this regard, the geomorphologic classes identified for a geographic area can be used as a logical and physical territorial support upon which Geodiversity measurements can be obtained through geoprocessing. For each landform class identified at the database - postulated as an isotropic entity in terms of topographic shape, physical constitution and genetic processes - a planimetric rastering procedure can exhaustively generate a report on the occurrence of other relevant environmental characteristics, in the area covered by the selected landform. For this landform, it will be revealed how variable is the associated assemblage of other environmental characteristics such as soil, rock and vegetation types. Correlation measures and other comparative indicators can be derived from the results. A table containing some measurements of Geodiversity made on the Amazon Region is presented below, as an example of the operational possibilities of the mentioned concept.
Table 1 - Geodiversity indexes
