Operational, national-scale monitoring of river trajectories using satellite imagery

The global degradation of river ecosystems and the growing impacts of flood hazards have highlighted limitations in current river management approaches. In Europe, the Water Framework and Flood Directives promote integrated, catchment-scale assessments of hydromorphological conditions and flood risk. Such integration is essential for sustainable management. Planform dynamics and river bed aggradation/incision, for example, can modify channel conveyance and compromise flood mitigation measures, whereas granting more space to rivers can both enhance ecological quality and reduce flood peaks.

In this context, the availability of long-term satellite archives and advances in computational and machine-learning methods enable large-scale, high spatiotemporal resolution monitoring of large and medium river systems. However, despite this potential, the operational adoption of satellite-based river monitoring remains limited due to data complexity, interdisciplinary requirements, and the lack of harmonised computational infrastructures.

Thanks to a collaboration between industry, public institutions and the university, we developed a methodology to systematically map monthly water channel, channel width, sediment bars and vegetation dynamics, testing the results on the full archive of Sentinel-2 (10 m resolution) for medium-large Italian rivers (active channel > 30m - i.e. 3 Sentinel-2 pixels). In this talk, I will outline the applied methodology, discuss its applicability at national scale with Sentinel-2 data, and show how the generated products can better inform river habitat mapping, river conservation practices, and flood risk assessments by supporting consistent national scale geomorphic trajectories identification.