Remote Sensing—A Fast And Reliable Tool to Map the Morphodynamics of the River Systems for Environmental Management

River is a dynamic morphometric agent which shapes literally earth’s entire surface except the dry deserts and the ice-capped Polar Regions. The morphological variations in the river basins are under the influences of an ensemble of variables including, but not limited to, the precipitation, runoff, slope, soil, and many other processes including tectonics, sedimentation, oceanography and anthropogenic intervention. As the rivers provide sustenance to the fauna and flora including the human race, understanding the river systems is essential from the ecological and economic points of view. The river systems interact with and maintain a delicate equilibrium with the lithosphere–hydrosphere–atmosphere, which make understanding the fluvial dynamics a necessity. The ever-increasing pressures from the anthropogenic interventions, under the climate change scenarios make this task critical for sustainable management which in turn requires extensive data inputs on a spatio-temporal scale. However, the very dynamic nature of the river systems poses constraints on the data acquisition and subsequent analysis. In this paper, we attempt demonstrate the utility of remote sensing and GIS as tools for fast and reliable analysis of morphodynamics of rivers for environmental management.