The Binghamton Symposium series has never focused on the role of animals as geomorphic agents, even though work on this topic has a long and distinguished history that extends back to the final research projects of Charles Darwin (earthworms) and William Morris Davis (coral reefs).  The 1995 Symposium Biogeomorphology, Terrestrial and Freshwater Systems presented 21 papers, of which only 3 examined the biogeomorphic role of animals.  At the 2005 Symposium on Geomorphology and Ecosystems, only 1 of 16 papers examined animals.  The 2009 Symposium in Virginia on Geomorphology and Vegetation does not have any papers devoted to the geomorphic role of animals.  A Symposium on Zoogeomorphology and Ecosystem Engineering in 2011 would build on the interdisciplinary energy engendered at the 2005 and 2009 symposia without topical duplication.

         Zoogeomorphology was first defined in 1992 in a paper by David Butler in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, and was subsequently the subject of his book Zoogeomorphology – Animals as Geomorphic Agents, published in 1995.  That book examined the zoogeomorphic roles of natural populations of free-roaming animals.  Since then, work in this area has continued by an  increasing number of geomorphologists.  At the same time, work has also increased on the zoogeomorphic impacts of domesticated animals, such as cattle and sheep, as well as the impacts of feral animals (e.g.  wild horses and feral hogs).  Work on the zoogeomorphic impacts of animals has been published in the leading journals in the field of geomorphology and related disciplines, including Geomorphology, Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, Physical Geography, Catena, Journal of Arid Environments, and several ecological journals.

          Ecosystem Engineering is an increasingly important area of research that emerged in the mid 1990s in the ecological community.  Ecosystem Engineering examines the roles of life forms that structure their environments through activities such as burrowing, damming, or nest construction.  Papers on Ecosystem Engineering are written almost exclusively by ecologists whose works appear in a diversity of ecological journals, including Ecology, BioScience, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Oikos, European Journal of Soil Biology, Ecological Applications, Journal of Sea Research, and Journal of Tropical Ecology.

         Much of the work done in these two areas, zoogeomorphology and ecosystem engineering, has been “running parallel” to each other without integrating each other, or in some cases, without even being aware of the parallel track.  It is the goal of this Binghamton Symposium to bring these two groups of complementary researchers together, to increase awareness between the two disciplines of geomorphology and ecology, and to increase future cooperation among researchers involved in examining the role animals play in sculpting the face of the Earth.