Plotting of catchments of small rivers of Siberia with using GIS technologies

Abstract

The dynamic industrial and economic development of Siberia and the Far East contributes to the strengthening of anthropogenic pressure. In this context, prognostic studies aimed at studying changes in the components of the natural environment are gaining particular popularity. Geographical analysis of the territory can be performed on the basis of the basin structure of rivers, which act as an operational territorial unit. The article presents the results of constructing the boundaries of the basins of small rivers of the Arctic catchment area of the Asian part of Russia on the basis of remote sensing data of the Earth by means of GIS tools. The source material is a digital relief model GMTED 2010. The choice of test sites was based on the terrain. The obtained basin boundaries in vector format were compared with catchments identified by visual decoding on topographic raster maps of scale 1:200 000, 1:1 000 000. Verification of the constructed boundaries of small river basins showed comparable results of semi-automatic and expert methods (scale 1:1,000,000). The enlargement of the map scale and the catchment area leads to a reduction in the errors that occur. The data obtained are new for the study area.