Use of Multi-Platform-sensing for characterisation of land use in river corridors

Remote sensing is a powerful tool for homogeneous mapping of land use along river corridors. Considering the size of these systems and the diversity of land cover, data with high to very high space resolution and Near InfraRed information, to classify vegetation areas and waterbodies, are required. Therefore we use multi-platform-sensing to characterise land use (cover) in river corridors : aerial photography (0.5 m.) and SPOT 5 XS (10 m). Several protocols for multi-source and multi-date classifications, using object-oriented classification (eCognition software from Definiens), have been compared on a buffer of 1.2 km along 80 km of the Hérault river (southern France).