Boris Gailleton

Boris Gailleton

Postdoctoral Researcher

About me

Coming from my EGU Presentation? Click here for details about CHONK LEM

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the GFZ institute, in the Earth Surface Process Modelling section. My main research focus is on developing methods, algorithms and research software packages to deal with digital topography, i.e. either to process existing analysis with topographic analysis, or to simulate topography with landscape evolution models. I will be starting a new post-doc position in Rennes in July 2022.

Research Softwares

Here is a very brief summary of my ongoing, mature and/or side software projects. Feel free to contact me if any of those is interesting for you, the amount of work I put in each is dependent on my ongoing projects!

Numerical Modelling

  • CHONK: a directed cellular-automata frameworks for landscapes evolution. Mixing existing methods with cellular automata brings a whole new world of technical possibilities from solving lakes to tracking or exploring dynamic feedbacks while remining quite instinctive. This frameworks intends to be flexible, modular and fast. A first publication explaining the principle and demonstrating its advantages is getting ready while a full-fledged c++/python framework is WIP.

  • Other more minor contributions to fastscape or MuddPILE.

Topographic Analysis

  • LSDTopoTools: I actively worked on the core development of LSDTopoTools, a c++ framework to process topographic analysis for which I developped a lot of tools around the use of Chi coordinate, channel steepness, concavity index, watershed identification or other general-purpose geomorphic algorithm.

  • lsdtopytools: a python binding of LSDTopoTools bringing a number of its algorithms to interactive python using xtensor. I distribute it via a cross-platform conda package, hosted by conda-forge, to make it easy to use. I will write a small tutorial with explanations on this website in a bit. In the meantime, please check this repo for instructions and examples.

  • A lightweight python and web portage of some of these tools via the compilation of a common c++ core with pybind11 and webassembly. Contact me if interested: I have already a core of function ready to be used, but this is a side project. See this example page (might be buggy with small screens) for a sneak pic of what it can do.

Feel free to contact me: boris.gailleton@gfz-potsdam.de