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Empiricist and hypothetico-deductive traditions have served well in the development of the understanding of hydrologic and erosion processes across a range of disciplinary backgrounds. Because data are hard-won, there is a tendency to give emphasis to them in developing understanding, but this emphasis often ignores the conceptual underpinning of the data leading to a range of problems such as the affirmation of the consequent. Realist approaches have more recently stressed the importance of multi-methodological and iterative approaches in producing more coherent process understanding. A range of interdisciplinary work on ecohydrology and ecogeomorphology has also started to focus on the limitations of approaches grounded in general systems theory as producing inherently static representations of the environment. Increasingly, complex systems theory has been applied to these fields in order to represent the dynamics of the environment, interactions across different spatial scales, and the evolution of its parts. These developments have occurred in parallel with critiques of understanding and managing environmental systems based on equilibrium concepts. A second strand of progress relates to technological advances. Across a range of scales, methods such as satellite and airborne remote sensing and particle imaging have made observations about the detail of environmental patterns clearer, which has helped challenge or clarify existing interpretations, e.g. of flow processes. Increasing miniaturization and computational advances are also enabling many flow and erosion processes to be instrumented and analyzed at appropriate spatio-temporal scales. This presentation will draw on both conceptual and technological advances to evaluate how these two strands are intertwined. It will use a range of examples to evaluate how process conceptualization affects measurement and how numerical and hardware modelling can be used as a means of integrating and strictly testing process knowledge. Based on these evaluations, it will conclude with an overview of some of the key challenges for the next decade.