Monitoring morphological changes in Himalayan proglacial rivers though a semi-automated classification approach

The monitoring of hydro-morphological changes in proglacial rivers is crucial to expand the knowledge of unified river management. Himalayan region in South Asia is one of the extremely glaciated, vulnerable mountainous areas on globe and a source of plenty of rivers. The remoteness of proglacial zones and complexity to have access to the majority of sites for field investigation, highlights the viability of remote sensing data. The main aim of the research is to analyze the recent morphological dynamics in Himalayan proglacial river channels by means of remote sensing techniques. This              investigation is carried out on a number of different multispectral satellite imageries for the duration of 2000 to 2020. For the classification of river channel delineation and monitoring a semi-automated approach is used, based on geographic object based image analysis (GEOBIA). Multispectral satellite data acquired by high resolution Sentinel-2 images is processed to extract the channels and variations over time. Very high resolution (VHR) satellite image WorldView-2 is acquired for the validation of classification method, of overall accuracy obtained by high resolution images. The study is based on remote sensing analysis coupled to river evolutionary trajectories, and to the validation of reliability to free accessible high resolution satellite data for similar results to  VHR images.