Identification and analysis of long-term changes in river deltas and riparian zones using time-series multispectral data

Today’s remote sensing data and technologies offer the capability to effectively monitor diverse and challenging environments around the world, such as coastal river and riparian zones. Coastal riparian zones and river deltas usually demonstrate extreme coastline changes in terms of the extent of water coverage of inland territories due to flood events, low and high tides, the climate, specific environmental characteristics, etc. In this paper, we exploit freely available multispectral time series data for previous decades, utilizing Landsat missions in order to develop an open-source-based image processing pipeline for the extraction of the actual yearly average coastline status of riparian river delta areas. The latter present significant temporal coastline changes between years, semesters, and months. Average mean maps are generated and then compared to several temporal levels in order to distinguish long-term significant changes and ecosystem threats. Additionally, a custom long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is deployed to forecast the evolution of the coastline by exploiting the average value for each pixel across all available images as a training sample and producing a forecast output for the next period. The network achieves accuracy scores of 89.77% over 'non-water' depicting pixels and 84.26% over 'water' depicting pixels, for regions that present frequent changes between land and water coverage over time. The predicted map presents high statistical agreement with the respective average map generated in two different validation approaches, with kappa coefficients of 85.9% and 91.4%, respectively.