Observations and prediction of riverbank erosion and accretion from Landsat imagery and ARIMA model

The alluvial rivers all around the world face a common problem, which is their meandering pattern. These meander formations are hence, the outcome of the nature and human interference. River Jhelum is dynamically active and is continuously changing its pattern. Many people make their living from agriculture which is conducted on the river banks. Nevertheless, their life is so tough due to the fact that the river erosion takes place so frequently, as a result, people residing nearby the river are mostly affected. Additionally, the extraction of sand and encroachment of banks causes Jhelum River to change its coarse and finally cause floods. Therefore, bearing in mind the catchment area and the importance of this river, we have endeavoured to grasp the spatiotemporal changes (erosion, accretion, and unchanged area) with landuse-landcover (LULC) analysis from 1990 to 2023. The final step was to predict the future trend of erosion, accretion and unchanged areas using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model up to 2035. From our analysis we found that the maximum and minimum amount of erosion occurred in the year 2011 and 2022 which accounted for 369.48 ha and 58.14 ha, respectively. Also, the highest and lowest amount of deposition was documented in the year 2011and 2008 with a value of 205.48 ha, and 29.87 ha respectively. Also, the LULC analysis shows that from 1990 to 2023 the area of water bodies increased by 38.94 ha, built-up area decreased by 702.1 ha, vegetation increased by 2966.1 ha and barren land decreased by 2302.4 ha. The ARIMA model shows wide range of R2 (0.31–0.89) and BIC (0.12–5.44) values and forecasted the values of erosion, accretion and unchanged area. The forecasting shows erosion values from 1.27 to 46.82 ha, accretion values from 0.87 to 11.67 ha, and unchanged area varies from 13.19 to 171.53 ha for years 2023 to 2035. The outcome of this study will help the Government in preventing river bank erosion and deposition and this study will be base in conducting further research in the same type of rivers all over the world.