TY  - JOUR
A1  - Uereyen, Soner
A1  - Kuenzer, Claudia
T1  - A review of earth observation-based analyses for major river basins
JF  - Remote Sensing
N2  - Regardless of political boundaries, river basins are a functional unit of the Earth’s land surface and provide an abundance of resources for the environment and humans. They supply livelihoods supported by the typical characteristics of large river basins, such as the provision of freshwater, irrigation water, and transport opportunities. At the same time, they are impacted i.e., by human-induced environmental changes, boundary conflicts, and upstream–downstream inequalities. In the framework of water resource management, monitoring of river basins is therefore of high importance, in particular for researchers, stake-holders and decision-makers. However, land surface and surface water properties of many major river basins remain largely unmonitored at basin scale. Several inventories exist, yet consistent spatial databases describing the status of major river basins at global scale are lacking. Here, Earth observation (EO) is a potential source of spatial information providing large-scale data on the status of land surface properties. This review provides a comprehensive overview of existing research articles analyzing major river basins primarily using EO. Furthermore, this review proposes to exploit EO data together with relevant open global-scale geodata to establish a database and to enable consistent spatial analyses and evaluate past and current states of major river basins.
KW  - major river basins
KW  - catchment
KW  - watershed
KW  - Earth observation
KW  - remote sensing
KW  - spatial analyses
KW  - land surface
KW  - surface water
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-193849
SN  - 2072-4292
VL  - 11
IS  - 24
ER  -