Aerial photographs from the Yampa and Little Snake Rivers in northwest Colorado used to characterize channel changes occurring between 1954 and 1961

Aerial photographs of the Yampa and Little Snake Rivers acquired in 1954 and 1961 were used to examine channel changes occurring along these two rivers during this time period. In addition, these data were used to develop and test a generalizable new approach to characterizing the uncertainty associated with analyses of channel change based on time series of remotely sensed data, which we term the Spatially Distributed Probabilistic (SDP) method. This technique accounts for errors introduced during: 1) image co-registration and geo-referencing; 2) interpreting the location of the channel boundary; and 3) digitizing the channel boundary. The method provides a probability distribution of channel locations and can be used to calculate [...]