Remote sensing of river corridors: A review of current trends and future directions

River corridors play a crucial environmental, economic, and societal role yet also represent one of the world's most dangerous natural hazards, making monitoring imperative to improve our understanding and to protect people. Remote sensing offers a rapidly growing suite of methods by which river corridor monitoring can be performed efficiently, at a range of scales and in difficult environmental conditions. This paper aims to evaluate the current state and assess the potential future of river corridor monitoring, whilst highlighting areas that require further investigation. We initially review established methods that are used to undertake river corridor monitoring, framed by the context and scales upon which they are applied. Subsequently, we review cutting edge technologies that are being developed and focussed around unmanned aerial vehicle and multisensor system advances. We also “horizon scan” for future methods that may become increasingly prominent in research and management, citing examples from within and outside of the fluvial domain. Through review of the literature, it has become apparent that the main gap in fluvial remote sensing lies in the trade-off between resolution and scales. However, prioritising process measurements and simultaneous multisensor data collection is likely to offer a bigger advance in understanding than purely from better surveying methods alone. Challenges regarding the legal deployment of more complex systems, as well as effectively disseminating data into the science community, are amongst those that we propose need addressing. However, the plethora of methods currently available means that researchers and monitoring agencies will be able to identify suitable techniques for their needs.