Remote sensing of rivers: the emergence of a subdiscipline in the river sciences

Abstract

This article reports on the special issue of Earth Surface Processes and Landforms dedicated to remote sensing of rivers. This emerging subdiscipline of river science has grown at a rapid rate in recent years because of: (a) the growing desire and need for data to document and explore the full range of spatial and temporal variations in river systems; (b) evolving technologies that enable lower cost data acquisition, processing and analysis at reach to catchment to continental scales; and (c) the increasing engagement of river scientists with GIScience. The convergence of these factors and the ever growing number of practitioners speaks to the need for more communication among researchers, a major reason for creating this special issue. The 12 articles in the volume cover a broad spectrum of applications that use a variety of platforms and sensors, ranging from photogrammetric mapping of riffle-pool morphology beneath forest canopy using a camera mounted on a hand held pole to satellite-based synthetic radar mapping of subcontinental scale hydrology of large rivers. In this overview each of the 12 articles is briefly summarized. Based on these works and other research, it is concluded that the time for more widespread application of river remote sensing techniques is now. To promote more widespread use of remote sensing techniques for river science and management, the following are advocated: (a) developing stand alone or plug-in software products that enable non-expert users to implement these new methods, (b) incorporating remote sensing of rivers training into classes, workshops, and on-line tutorials; and (c) promoting more intentional and formal collaboration among members of the river remote sensing community.

Surface water connectivity dynamics of a large scale extreme flood

“…However, recent advances in remote sensing datasets and new processing methods are providing new opportunities to study rivers and their floodplains at unprecedented levels of spatial and temporal detail (Smith, 1997;Marcus and Fonstad, 2010). Also, increasingly, remotely sensed flood extent data are being successfully used to build, calibrate and validate complex large scale hydraulic models where the correct representation of dynamic flow processes are crucial (e.g.…”

The use of remote sensing to characterise hydromorphological properties of European rivers

“…RS technology is transforming our capacity to analyse river systems (Marcus and Fonstad 2010; by increasing the spatial coverage of the morphological information gathered by field campaigns. As a result we have entered an era where data can be considered 'virtually' continuous along the river channel.…”

“…Marcus and Fonstad (2010) stress that RS techniques should be more widely applied in both science and management, but the consistent progress seen in the field means that the range of applications to fluvial geomorphology is now remarkable.…”

“…However due to the steep cost of data acquisition, the use of RS for river characterisation has been oriented mostly towards answering specific research questions for case studies rather than confronting aspects of operational implementation for wide scale applications, as encouraged by Marcus and Fonstad (2010). Recently, though, the acquisition of RS data covering large areas (regional or national) has started to achieve suitable spatial and spectral resolution for fluvial science.…”

Image analysis techniques to estimate river discharge using time-lapse cameras in remote locations

“…Most existing work on river discharge measurement is either based on satellite/aerial images (Smith, 1997;Brakenridge et al, 2007;Marcus and Fonstad, 2010) or on detailed surface shape/flow velocity measurements, e.g. particle image velocimetry (Bradley et al, 2002;Hauet et al, 2008;Bird et al, 2010;Tsubaki et al, 2011).…”