River incision is generally believed to have driven the evolution of regional landscape,and therefore the rates and spatio-temporal pattern act as the starting point to explore the interactions between tectonic, surface processes, and climate. Depending on the preservation conditions of fluvial terrace, the river incision rate can be calculated directly by the cumulative incision amount and temporal duration, and ranges at the time scale of thousands and several million years. Therefore, river incision rate is the key component linking erosion rates at various time scales, and possesses fine resolution in terms of spatio-temporal scales. When calculating river incision rate, the upper bound of cumulative incision amount is the bedrock strath of the target higher terrace,while the lower bound is preferred to be that of the lower dated terrace. In addition, the cumulative incision timing is better constrained by the burial ages of alluvial sediments as close to the bedrock strath as possible. When using river incision rates to derive tectonic deformation rates,it is generally assumed that the regional landscape is in an equilibrium state, and correspondingly river incision rates are believed to equal to rock uplift induced by tectonic uplift. This assumption generally fails due to the instability of river incision behavior, which might result from differential hydrologic response in time and space to the Quaternary climate fluctuations. Furthermore, the transition timing from river aggradation to incision does not agree well with the glacial-interglacial shift timing. This might be due to upstream migration of the knickpoint, or various ways or magnitudes of fluvial response to climate variations. Consequently, multiple methods should be utilized to capture the fundamental data of tectonic deformation, climate change, and surface processes on a series of time and space scales, which contribute to quantify the widespread and complex interactions among tectonic,climate and surface processes via landscape numerical modeling.