Remote sensing of river corridors: A review of current trends and future directions

Abstract

River corridors play a crucial environmental, economic, and societal role yet also represent one of the world's most dangerous natural hazards, making monitoring imperative to improve our understanding and to protect people. Remote sensing offers a rapidly growing suite of methods by which river corridor monitoring can be performed efficiently, at a range of scales and in difficult environmental conditions. This paper aims to evaluate the current state and assess the potential future of river corridor monitoring, whilst highlighting areas that require further investigation. We initially review established methods that are used to undertake river corridor monitoring, framed by the context and scales upon which they are applied. Subsequently, we review cutting edge technologies that are being developed and focussed around unmanned aerial vehicle and multisensor system advances. We also "horizon scan" for future methods that may become increasingly prominent in research and management, citing examples from within and outside of the fluvial domain. Through review of the literature, it has become apparent that the main gap in fluvial remote sensing lies in the trade-off between resolution and scales. However, prioritising process measurements and simultaneous multisensor data collection is likely to offer a bigger advance in understanding than purely from better surveying methods alone. Challenges regarding the legal deployment of more complex systems, as well as effectively disseminating data into the science community, are amongst those that we propose need addressing. However, the plethora of methods currently available means that researchers and monitoring agencies will be able to identify suitable techniques for their needs.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A Review of Earth Observation-Based Analyses for Major River Basins

“…To our knowledge, there is no review article mainly focusing on EO-based applications in the context of large river basins. However, we identified related reviews e.g., investigating the use of EO in characterizing surface water [14], EO for monitoring river corridors [26], EO for water resources management [11], EO for monitoring flood extent and water level [27], or application of EO in hydrology [28,29]. The overarching objective of this review is to analyze EO-based datasets and their respective spatial and temporal scale.…”

“…Brazil 20USA (76) Canda (11) Others 4Others (12) Taiwan 7Japan (13) China (62) Germany (26) France (18) Italy (8) Others 17Egypt 5Australia 7New Zealand (1)…”

Measuring High Levels of Total Suspended Solids and Turbidity Using Small Unoccupied Aerial Systems (sUAS) Multispectral Imagery

“…Acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCP) along with satellite remote sensing are not viable options. ADCPs are not widely used, can only be utilized at the scale of large river reaches and are expensive [18]. Satellite remote sensing has been used to roughly estimate TSS concentrations, however, it requires long-term in situ TSS measurements and has coarse spatial resolution that can only be applied to coastal areas, oceans, large rivers or large lakes [18,19].…”

“…ADCPs are not widely used, can only be utilized at the scale of large river reaches and are expensive [18]. Satellite remote sensing has been used to roughly estimate TSS concentrations, however, it requires long-term in situ TSS measurements and has coarse spatial resolution that can only be applied to coastal areas, oceans, large rivers or large lakes [18,19]. Satellite remote sensing for water quality purposes also fails to address the inherent variability within a low-resolution pixel due to various factors, such as unsteady flows, sediment transport dynamics and wind influence [20].…”

Drone Based Quantification of Channel Response to an Extreme Flood for a Piedmont Stream

“…Despite this general understanding of upland fluvial form and process, few studies have researched the effect of extreme events on the upland sediment cascade [27][28][29][30] and torrent style piedmont systems remain under studied [16,31]. The use of new remote sensing technologies in fluvial research (see reviews [32,33]), such as drone-based surveys [34,35], are and have enhanced high-resolution mapping and the monitoring of river basins. This study investigates the upper Liza Beck, Cumbria, UK piedmont stream response to a recent extreme rainfall-induced flood event (Storm Desmond, December 2015) through the use of images derived from an unmanned aerial vehicle and structure from motion photogrammetry.…”