Channel Migration and Consequential Land Use Land Cover Changes of Subansiri River, Assam, North-Eastern India

Abstract

Abstract Subansiri River is the largest tributary of the Brahmaputra River running through the Indian states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, and Tibet, the Autonomous Region of China. The Subansiri River is 442 km long with a drainage basin of 32,640 km2 and it contributes approximately 7.92% of the Brahmaputra’s total flow. Sequential Channel shifting has been witnessed as the most important characteristic of the Subansiri River of Assam. The detailed study on channel migration of the present course of the Subansiri River through the upper floodplain of Brahmaputra valley indicates that the area is under active erosion for a long time. Therefore, an attempt has been made to understand the relationship between the rate of channel migration and successive land use/land cover changes in its surrounding floodplain area. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithms are applied on Landsat images of the years 1973, 1988, 2001, and 2017 for generating land use/land cover maps through supervised classification technique. The overall accuracy of the land use/land cover classification ranges between 81% (for the year 1988) and 84% (for the year 2017). The land use/land cover maps show an increase in the built-up area and a decrease in the agricultural area. The change has been observed vis-a-vis channel migration indicating that the migration directly affects the floodplain habitats which in turn affects the land use, Findings of this study highlight geomorphological instabilities of the study area and the vulnerability of the habitations residing near the Subansiri river.