Qgis RiverBanks tools suite for morphological river analysis

Riverbank analyses are crucial for understanding fluvial dynamics, evaluating environmental risks, and promoting the sustainable management of river catchments. The monitoring, assessment, and governance of river basins, as prescribed by EU Directives 2000/60/EC (Water Framework Directive) and 2007/60/EC (Floods Directive), are declined by Member States with their own guidelines and methodologies. This makes it difficult to develop globally applicable calculation tools for analyses.
To address these challenges, we developed a new toolkit of QGIS-based model scripts called QGIS Riverbanks Tools, advancing global riverbank analysis, management, and classification for various applications and serving as a foundational step toward a comprehensive suite for the assessment of the historical evolution of watercourses and the prediction of future tendencies. The scripts are specifically designed to support river analysis and risk assessment procedures, such as those outlined in the Italian IDRAIM methodology (Rinaldi et al., 2014), in particular, the developed tools are:

• Confined Valley Index (CVI): This tool quantifies the confinement of a river within its valley by calculating the ratio between the valley bottom width and riverbank width. It provides critical insights into river confinement, aiding in the identification of areas influenced by geomorphologic or hydrological constraints.
• River Banks Distance (RBD) and River Banks Distance Comparison (RBDC): These scripts calculate the distances between the river centerline and its banks using transects along a defined path. They facilitate the comparison of riverbank distances across different time periods (in any temporal scale), supports historical trend analyses and quantitative assessments of riverbank erosion.
• River Banks Segments Cutter (RBSC): This model segments riverbanks into discrete sections based on predefined stretches of the river centerline. Each segment inherits attributes from the centerline, facilitating localized analyses and improving data granularity.
• River Banks Safety Bands Tool (RBSBT): By calculating buffer zones around riverbanks based on annual erosion rates and user-defined multiplicative factors, this tool generates safety bands. These zones are critical for risk assessment and the planning of mitigation measures.

The QGIS Riverbanks Tools have been effectively applied in hydrological and hydraulic studies across more than 15 Sicilian rivers, yielding significant results in flood risk management and river morphology monitoring. By providing a standardized framework for analysis, these tools enhance accuracy in risk assessment and river segment classification and facilitate comparative analyses across diverse hydrodynamic fluvial contexts. Users can define parameters such as transect width, segmentation step, and erosion rate factors, adapting the models to various river systems. All tools generate many outputs with geospatial layers with rich attribute tables, enabling immediate visualization and in-depth analyses. Detailed guidance on using each tool, including descriptions of input parameters, variables, and output data, is embedded within the models as in-built help documentation in the QGIS processing tools. 
This first-of-its-kind toolkit provides a comprehensive solution within QGIS, empowering hydrologists to conduct in-depth, granular analyses of riverbanks across a wide range of fluvial system assessment and management approaches. Future development will prioritize integrating these tools into a user-friendly QGIS plugin and incorporating near-real-time hydrological data to enhance predictive capabilities.