The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the interest of High Spatial Resolution Imagery (HSRI) and the limits of coarse land cover data such as CORINE Land Cover (CLC), for the accurate characterization of land cover structure along river corridors and of its functional links with freshwater ecological status on a large scale. For this purpose, we compared several spatial indicators built from ...

The Scheldt watershed is characterized by a high population density, intense industrial activities and intensive agriculture and breeding. A monthly monitoring (n = 16) of the abundance of two faecal indicator bacteria (FIB), Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci (IE), showed that microbiological water quality of the main rivers of the Scheldt drainage network was poor (median values rang...

Sustainable integrated catchment management is a complex task that often involves finding compromise between the views of multiple stakeholders that may not easily be brought to consensus. Interactive three dimensional (3D) visualisations of landscapes can facilitate discussion, but these can only partially inform decision makers as many important aspects of interventions are abstract. Such abs...

The need for assessment of aquatic ecosystem contamination and of its impact on water dwelling organisms was developed in response to rising aquatic environmental pollution. In this field study, liver enzymes of phase I and phase II of xenobiotic transformation, namely cytochrome P450, ethoxyresorufin-O-deethylase, glutathione-S-transferase and tripeptide glutathione were used to assess the con...

In the Mississippi River Alluvial Valley (MAV), complete alteration of river-floodplain hydrology allowed for widespread conversion of forested bottomlands to intensive agriculture, resulting in nearly 80% forest loss. Governmental programs have attempted to restore forest habitat and functions within this altered landscape by the methods of tree planting (afforestation) and local hydrologic en...

The aim of our study was to assess the occurrence and to determine the concentrations of organochlorine pesticides and indicator PCB congeners in muscle tissue of freshwater fish species and, additionally, in sediments collected from three sampling sites of the Vistula River in the vicinity of Cracow. The determinations of HCH isomers, HCB, DDTs (p,p'-DDE, p,p'-DDD, o,p'-DDT and p,p'-DDT), and ...

The increase and the complexity of data caused by the uncertain environment is today's reality. In order to identify water quality effectively and reliably, this paper presents a modified fast clustering algorithm for water quality analysis. The algorithm has adopted a varying weights K-means cluster algorithm to analyze water monitoring data. The varying weights scheme was the best weighting i...

Using the field sampling data obtained in November 2012, the aquatic ecosystem health of river network in Hangzhou Bay New District in Ningbo was assessed with Plankton Index of Biology Integrity (P-IBI). In these samples, 125 species of phytoplankton and 19 species of zooplankton were identified and the dominant phytoplankton species of each sampling sites were almost pollution indicator speci...

In both GIS and terrain analysis, drainage systems are important components. Owing to local topography and subsurface geology, a drainage system achieves a particular drainage pattern based on the form and texture of its network of stream channels and tributaries. Although research has been done on the description of drainage patterns in geography and hydrology, automatic drainage pattern recog...

A major challenge in palaeohydrology is the extraction of continuous palaeoflood information from geophysical records. A high-resolution sediment core off the Minjiang estuary area in the Taiwan Strait, SE China, records the sedimentation history from approximately 1660 to the present. The alkane ratio C31/C17, a classic organic geochemical indicator of terrestrial/aquatic matter, peaks in the ...