Determination of Land Use/Cover and Topographical/Morphological Features of River Watershed for Water Resources Management Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Abstract

Optimal management and development of water resources can be achieved with the realization of planning and implementation stages of the plans correctly, completely and timely. Today, Remote Sensing (RS) with opportunities to collect data fast and belong to same area at
different time periods and characteristics and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with the capabilities of integration of different data groups, data-processing and updating, spatial and three-dimensional analysis, querying and modeling can be effectively used in water resources planning and management. In this study, the utilization of RS and GIS for planning, design and management of water resources was explained; the topics of the determination of land use/cover and topographical/morphological characteristics at a river watershed level and the methods in detail were discussed. In this context, available data sources and structures to determine land use/cover, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), slope, aspect, watershed and
sub-watershed boundaries and drainage network, the issues of data errors and uncertainty, automatically generation of watershed boundary and drainage network from DEM and the accuracy of results were examined, the impact of DEM’s accuracy on the parameters automatically generated from DEM was investigated.