Watershed remote sensing: definition and prospective

Remote sensing is widely used and plays an irreplaceable role in integrated watershed management and watershed science. This paper focuses on the definition, progress and prospective of watershed remote sensing, and provides a systematic summary of relevant watershed remote sensing data products. Watershed remote sensing studies the analysis capabilities for underlying structure, water cycle, water resources, water hazards and watershed ecology and provides related remote sensing data products. These products are gradually becoming continuously updated public products and services that can meet the requirements for timeliness, completeness, continuity and high accuracy of monitoring information for integrated watershed management. The combination of Watershed remote sensing and cloud computing could reduce the bottleneck of the generation of watershed remote sensing data products. Combined with and cloud services, the difficulty and cost of watershed remote sensing data products application can be reduced, which will be the mainstream direction of watershed remote sensing towards practicality, thus providing comprehensive information support for integrated watershed management.