Riverbank Erosion and Accretion from Landsat

Riverbank erosion presents a serious risk to people and infrastructure. These risks are becoming increasingly hard to predict because of direct modification of the rivers by damming and bank stabilization, as well as indirect modification by climate change and land use change. Geomorphologists have developed scaling relationships based on watershed characteristics; however, these relationships are very coarse and limited by the available data. This research uses twenty years of satellite imagery to develop the first global dataset of riverbank erosion, which both confirms existing knowledge and opens new avenues of research.