The importance of remote sensing from Sentinel missions for monitoring and managing our river systems

Rivers rank among some of the most threatened ecosystems in the world and are the focus of costly restoration and management programmes targeted to improve river conditions and to ensure the essential functions and services that rivers provide to our society. The scope of this workshop is to discuss recent advances in river management and monitoring strategies, by combining results from two projects lead by the Natural Research Management (NRM) group of the Politecnico di Milano: AMBER and IRIS. AMBER (Adaptive Management of Barriers in European Rivers) is a H2020 project which explores adaptive management to the operation of dams and barriers in European rivers. The project aims to achieve a more efficient restoration of stream connectivity, and to address impacts caused by river fragmentation adopting emerging technologies in remote sensing, numerical models and other fields. The IRIS (Italian Research and development Initiative for Spaceborne river monitoring) project aims at developing tools for monitoring medium-large river systems from remote sensing combining drones, traditional field techniques and satellite data from the Sentinel missions of the Copernicus program. IRIS is funded by the Italian Environmental Agency (ISPRA) under the umbrella of the ASI-ISPRA initiative “Habitat Mapping”.

The full program and the keynote talk are available in the attached file.

Kirstie Fryirs, Professor of fluvial geomorphology at the Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), will open the workshop, bringing us examples of the consolidated experiences she and her research group have developed over the last decade in Australia and New Zealand in the field of fundamental and applied fluvial geomorphology.