ABSTRACT
The starting point for effective environmental management is an appropriate level of understanding of the current state of the environment. This has typically required on-site assessment or investigation. Such activities, including walkover surveys, which provide vital information, can be very resource- and/or labour-intensive. This then reduces the resources available to implement measures to remediate, protect, and improve the environment. In this context, there are several current and potential applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that will help in the management of river catchments to better protect and improve these environments for people and wildlife. These could be used routinely by practitioners to increase their effectiveness when carrying out their environmental assessment and management work. UAVs can also be used in combination with other remote sensing technologies, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), modelling, and visualisation approaches to further extend their usefulness. Within this chapter, we aim to give an insight into the use of UAVs for fluvial applications. We review current data collection and processing considerations and explore examples of UAV use for riverine feature detection and mapping. Finally, we demonstrate the quantification of physical river parameters from UAV data.
