River health monitoring in the Ayeyarwady river basin in Myanmar

Abstract

Freshwater is a finite resource. It offers goods and services of fundamental importance for the development of human societies. In the developing countries, water-related infrastructure developed rapidly, which will bring prosperity to an impoverished country but also risks compromising the sustainability of the environment. The scarcity of useful monitoring tools due to limited knowledge and capacity hinders informing management of the health on waterways in Myanmar, one of the developing countries. Therefore, we aimed to develop an approach to monitor the health of river ecosystems using remote-sensing satellite images and freshwater macroinvertebrate communities. This doctoral thesis looks into the potential of remote sensing for monitoring the quality of surface water in Myanmar’s rivers and it demonstrates how space datasets can be used to assess the water quality of rivers in Myanmar. We show that a remote sensing analysis using a space dataset can be successfully applied to detect the Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC) and the water temperature of the Ayeyarwady River basin, in the central dry zone of Myanmar. Remote sensing information can offer a spatial and temporal view of the surface water quality in regard to suspended solids, and water temperature for larger bodies of water such as the Ayeyarwady and Chindwin Rivers...