ental
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den),
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1anage-
hysical
rology,
rably in
se. The
individual composition of the Vegetation-Soil-Topography-
Interface (VSTI) of any catchment is resulting in a specific
environmental potential for the regional development of
agriculture and forestry, which in turn have subsequent impacts
on the hydrological, erosion and solute transport dynamics of the
river catchments.
Environmental problems resulting from inadequate management
of agriculture and forestry in Europe must therefore be understood
as being primarily related to the hydrological transport dynamics
of river catchments. With respect to the management of water
resources of an ldealized European Catchment (IEC), such
environmental problems can be differentiated into: floods, land
degradation and water pollution. They can only be dealt with, if a
structured systems approach as shown in Figure | is applied
integrating different techniques to identify the complex systems
dynamics.
2. THEMATIC AND CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
Traditional methods, i.e. field mapping, surveying or soil
sampling, used at present to derive realistic parameterizations of
the distributed heterogeneity of the VSTI have obvious
deficiencies: They provide detailed informations "on the spot" but
the regionalization of such local informations and measures
describing their representativeness has still not been resolved yet.
By combining the classification potential of high resolution Earth
Observation (EO) data with the powerful spatial anlysis available
from a Geographic Information System (GIS), a high resolution in
time and space for heterogeneous VSTIs of river catchments is
achieved. Such an integration of EO data and GIS will overcome
the present deficiencies and will provide a toolset for improved
catchment model parameterization for a sustainable future
environmental catchment management.
" 2.1 The Idealized European Catchment (IEC)
As shown in Figure 2, ARSGISIP will be carried out in various
mesoscale test catchments selected by the respective national
Research End User Teams (RETs) and located in different
climatic zones of Europe. The results obtained from applying the
methodology of EO and integrated GIS analyses to parameterize
models applied in these test catchments will support an improved
> sustainable management of the respective river catchments;
> insight of the role of catchment heterogeneity as
conceptualized by the Idealized European Catchment (IEC)
schematically shown in Figures 1 and 2.
Each of the test catchments selected by the RETs of ARSGISIP is
representing a particular composition of physiographic properties
and management. Both are associated with environmental
problems, i.e. soil erosion, which are common in the European
environment of the respective climatic zone. By combining and
projecting all of these assemblies into the conceptualized IEC, a
“virtual catchment reality” is generated representative for the
majority of the European environment and their associated
> environmental problems related to the water supply and
catchment management strategies,
> physiographic catchment properties, to be parameterized for
prognostive models of hydrological, erosion and solute trans-
port dynamics, for which the project will deliver
Remote Sensing
- Topography A
^
- Land degradation AN
- Land cover
- Retention areas
- Properties
- Hydrology
- Flood generation mi
- Erosion dynamics 74 A
- Solute transport (4/53
- Response Units
Modelling
GIS Processing
nm E - Spatial distribution
- Erosion potential
- Stream network
- Parameterization
- Environment
- Water quality
- Sustainability
- Flood protection
- Simulations
Figure 1: ARSGISIP's integrated remote sensing approach towards the Idealized European Catchment (IEC)
Intemational Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998 115
