The automated extraction of the digital river network from digital elevation models is very important for the researches on both the river network structure analysis and the distributed watershed hydrological modeling. The automated digital river network extraction can not only help us quickly calculate the indices reflecting the river network characteristics, but also provide a basis for distributed flow routing. This paper introduces in? detail the automated method of digital river network extraction and analysis proposed by Garbrecht and Martz. This method has been applied to the Xunhe catchment in the upstream Hanjiang Basin for the digital river network extraction, the stream ordering and the channel section node indexing. It is found that the extracted digital river network is very close to the true situation. Besides, the topological relationship established on the basis of channel section node indices is very helpful to the distributed river flow routing.