Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection Using the Random Forest Approach: The Case of The Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia.

Monitoring land use change dynamics is critical for tackling food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss on a global scale. This study is designed to classify land use and land cover in the upper Blue Nile River Basin (BNRB) using a random forest (RF) algorithm. The Landsat images for Landsat 45, Landsat 7, and Landsat 8 are used for classification purposes. The study area is classified into seven land use/land cover classes: cultivated lands, bare lands, built-ups, forests, grazing lands, shrublands, and waterbodies. The accuracy of classified images is 83%, 85%, and 91% using the Kappa index of agreements. From 1983 to 2022 periods, cultivated lands and built-up areas increased by 47541 and 1777 km2, respectively, at the expense of grazing lands, shrublands, and forests. Furthermore, the area of water bodies has increased by 662 km2 due to the construction of small and large-scale irrigation and hydroelectric power generation dams. The main factors that determine agricultural land expansion are related to population growth. Therefore, land use and land cover change detection using a random forest is an important technique for multispectral satellite data classification to understand the optimal use of natural resources, conservation practices, and decision-making for sustainable development.

Hydromorphological evaluation of the river training impact on a multi-thread river system (Belá River, Carpathians, Slovakia).

The paper evaluates the impact of river training works designed to address problems associated with flooding on the braided-wandering Belá River in Slovakian Carpathians. This impact was investigated after the flood event in July 2018 on 11 river reaches where the river engineering and management intervention was applied. We analyzed its impact by spatio-temporal variations in river morphology (12 channel parameters) and changes in cross-section and hydraulic parameters (flow velocity, shear stress, stream power, W/D ratio) between pre- and post-flood management periods. The research hypotheses related to decreasing geodiversity in managed river reaches, a rapid increase in flow velocity during an extreme flood in river reaches where there is no sufficient floodplain inundation due to artificially high banks built by river training works, and increasing erosive force in the channel zone thanks to river management intervention were confirmed. The intervention in the braidplain area of the Belá River resulted in an undesirable simplification of the river pattern, loss of geomorphic diversity, loss of channel-floodplain connectivity, and disturbance and restraint of hydromorphological continuity. Identification of main conflicts of the Belá River management is important for clarifying the different approaches of stakeholders in the study area and aims to provide an objective illustration of their consequences. The presented analyses could help in future management issues as well as in the more critical decision-making process in vulnerable and rare braided river systems on the present when we are losing so many natural rivers by human decisions.

Channel and cut-bluff failure connectivity in a river system: Case study of the braided-wandering Belá River, Western Carpathians, Slovakia.

Straightforward sediment transport is not common in nature and material is storage during transport and reworked by the same processed that lead to initial mass erosion. Despite the development of quantitative assessment by application high accuracy topography measurement, lack of conceptualisation and combination with precise elevation model changes is still missing. This paper presents a field-based channel-bluff connectivity study based on a sediment cascade approach. A TLS (terrestrial laser scanning) time-series database was generated by systematic monitoring of cut-bluff slope surface of the braided-wandering Belá River. The database was used to estimate volume changes and allowed to develop the conceptualisation model of coupling of cut-bluff slope based on spatial and temporal analyses of channel hydrology, gravity conditioned transformation of matter and a detailed of sediment budget calculations. Historical analyses have shown that a flow direction perpendicular to the slope is crucial to activate cut-bluff slope material movement and initiate a sediment cascade, as significant contributors of sediment into the river. Sediment supply to the channels correlates with the magnitude of flood events (maximum discharge, cumulative discharge, cumulative discharge higher than RI1.5, and duration of discharges higher than RI1.5) and lateral migration as a main factor controlling the behaviour of the cut-bluff slope-channel system. During the survey from March 2016 to November 2018, were transported 10,103 m3 (25,964 t) of fine-grained sediment into the river channel.