Monitoring of the riverbed of river Dniester using GIS technologies

The paper analyses the causes of riverbeds shifts and meandering of Dniester. Among such reasons are mostly climatic, geographical and anthropogenic factors, such as frequent floods semistable rocks and soils, deforestation and removal of gravel and sand material from the river bed. The research is carried out on the lowland of the Dniester along the 100 km section over the 100 years period. Topographic maps (1910, 1923, 1976 years), and satellite images from Landsat 5 (1986) Landsat 7 (2000) Sentinel (2017) and special soil maps was taken as initial information. The Dniester meandering research shows significant correlation in horizontal riverbed movements for the periods from 1910 till 1986 and from 1984 till 2017. Correlation rate variate within the limits 0.97 – 0.99 respectively that corresponds to the almost full dependence in the riverbed displacement configuration. Beside that the maximum horizontal deviations can reached up to 800 meters. In addition, it was revealed that sediment processes caused significant increase in the area of the river islands from 1910 to 1976 by 2.4 times, and from 1976 to 2017 the island areas somewhat reduced. Nearly the largest island River channel is divided into two branches. Sinuosity coefficient is 2.3 over the test site. The analysis of soil maps shows prevailing bleached soils and loamy on alluvial deposits soils in areas with highest sinuosity coefficient.