Bill Dietrich’s research focuses on the processes that underlie the evolution of landscapes. His research group and collaborators are developing geomorphic transport laws for soil production, weathering and transport, and river and debris flow incision into bedrock.  They are exploring the processes that control the sorting of sediment on river beds, the transport of sediment in steep, coarse bedded channels, the routing of sediment through river networks, the influence of sediment supply on river morphodynamics, the entrainment of sediment to form debris flows, and the dispersion and deposition of sediment across floodplains.

New computational approaches are being tested to predict the size and location of shallow landslides.  He is collaborating in an intensive field investigation to identify, quantify, and model the processes that will control the co-evolution of climate, vegetation and water availability in Northern California forested landscapes.  He is part of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission to Mars, and  is collaborating on related field studies of the soil development and landscape evolution in the hyper arid Atacama Desert in Chile.

Dietrich co-founded the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping.  As part of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics he is co-developing a digital terrain model for predicting salmon populations from digital terrain data.  Other collaborative studies are underway to link ecologic and geomorphic processes.