As I mentioned in my 'Ecology and geomorphology' lecture Charles Darwin really started the ball rolling on investigating the impacts plants and animals make on geomorphic processes. He did this largely through his experimental studies on earthworms and the amount of sediment they move. His work is highly important in providing one of the very first (and still a well-cited) set of figures quantifying how much geomorphic work earthworms do. One of the key tasks awaiting geomorphologists today is to provide further datasets on different species, such as badgers, turtles, ants, gophers, ground squirrels, moles, packrats...I could go on...
Here's an interesting article and radio story about Darwin's earthworm experiments and follow-up work that has been done on them:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100627614
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