The remote sensing monitoring and analysis of river system in Pudong New District of Shanghai

Shanghai is a region with dense river system, which consists of rivers and ponds. With a rapid increase of economy and urbanization, Pudong New District becomes an example of shanghai development. Unfortunately, the natural and ecological environment of Pudong has been greatly influenced, such as water network of river and pond, which takes effect to collect a large amount of rainwater and prevents city flood. It means that city´s drainage and flood-preventing ability was weakening seriously. For the purpose of understanding timely and dynamic change of water area and protecting its drainage ability, Remote Sensing (RS) technology has been used to monitor water network of river and pond in Pudong New District since 2003. This paper presents the content of the RS monitoring and the result of 5-year RS monitoring from 2003 to 2008. Then we will focus on analyzing the change features of rivers and ponds in Pudong New District. One effective measure taken by Pudong government was to adjust river system which means new river ways or new ponds were built with the same area as reduced water network, in order to control a total amount of water area and keep balance of the river system. Was the change of the decreasing rate of water area caused by the measure that the local government took or not? One model is used in this paper to evaluate the effectiveness of the measure. The result of evaluation shows that the measure of adjusting the river system was successful. This paper also demonstrates that remote sensing monitoring played a very important role in managing the area of rivers and ponds in Pudong New District. However, it is still difficult to increase the frequency of RS monitoring with limited funds.