Miloš Rusnák

Slovak Academy of Sciences | SAV · Department of Physical Geography, Geomorphology and Natural Hazards

Channel incision is an evident trend for river evolution in many European rivers and notably the Western Carpathians, whose former braided and multichannel wandering river system is transforming into a single‐thread channel, but it is often difficult to separate drivers and determine if incision is finished or is still ongoing. To overpass these re...

Abstract This article is focused on the investigation of the spatio-temporal variability of the Danube River reach’s vertical accretion thickness due to the response of the Danube River reach to bypassing. Five groyne-induced benches (GIBs) of the bypassed channel developed after water diversion in 1992 was studied by changes in topography for thr...

Monitoring land use change dynamics is critical for tackling food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss on a global scale. This study is designed to classify land use and land cover in the upper Blue Nile River Basin (BNRB) using a random forest (RF) algorithm. The Landsat images for Landsat 45, Landsat 7, and Landsat 8 are used for class...

Natural ecosystems provide many different services such as carbon sequestration, regulation of climate change, biodiversity, and aesthetic value. Ecosystem functions are significantly impacted by both natural and man-made processes, such as sediment and nutrient deposition. The Lake Tana basin faces significant problems with soil depletion, sedimen...

Riparian zones are dynamic ecosystems that form at the interface between the aquatic and terrestrial components of a landscape. They are shaped by complex interactions between the biophysical components of river systems, including hydrology, geomorphology, and vegetation. Remote sensing technology is a powerful tool useful for understanding riparia...

The Danube Plain (Podunajská rovina) hosts the largest fluvial system in Slovakia. In the past the territory of the Danube Plain has operated as a dynamic fluvial system (inland delta) with its own anastomosing, migrating, meandering and braided river channel patterns and the development of several fluvial terraces, levees, abandoned channels and a...

Slovakia is a small landlocked country in Central Europe. Its position is characterized by the intersection of major Eurasian tectonic and climatic domains, which predetermines general features of the Slovak landscape and the occurrence of specific landforms. The first work on the landscape, history and people of Slovakia, “Notitia Hungariae Novae...

The Belá River represents a reference braided-wandering river system to observe natural, or semi-natural, forms and processes in the mountain environment. In this chapter, human impact and spatio-temporal bio-morphological evolution of the Belá River from the second half of the twentieth century are described. For the high-energy Belá River, new gr...

The central part of Ondavská vrchovina upland represents a medium-altitude and moderately dissected relief with narrow elongated valleys. The Topľa and Ondava rivers are the main axis of flysch valleys and their flat bottoms are modelled by dynamic river processes acting upon thin layers of Quaternary sediments. They bear a record of all historical...

The territory Slovakia of reveals exceptionally high diversity of landforms. Geomorphological history of the Western Carpathians can be traced back to the Early/Middle Miocene (10 and 20 Ma) and of the Panonian Basin to the Late Miocene, respectively. The development the Western Carpathians went on in phases, through interaction of tectonic movemen...

Agricultural land abandonment is a dynamic process characterized by both significant spectral variability and spectral similarity to areas of agricultural land. The identification of abandoned agricultural land (AAL) based on remote sensing data must be preceded by field surveys that are focused on the acquisition of the physiognomic characteristic...

The paper evaluates the impact of river training works designed to address problems associated with flooding on the braided-wandering Belá River in Slovakian Carpathians. This impact was investigated after the flood event in July 2018 on 11 river reaches where the river engineering and management intervention was applied. We analyzed its impact by...

Stone mounds and walls are defined as the man-made accumulations of the unnecessary skeletal material accumulated over centuries as by-products of vineyards cultivation usually at the borders of plots. Their distribution, position, shapes and volume are analyzed; the basic types are defined and causes of their disappearance and transformation are i...

The dynamic geomorphological phenomena such as riverbank erosion require accurate and frequent mapping. In this study, we present a methodology for the assessment of volumetric changes in the river banks represented by high-resolution digital terrain models derived from 12 periodic terrestrial laser scanning surveys over the 3-year period. The meth...

The paper presents a methodological approach to preliminary flood risk assessment, which is conceptually based on regional typing and integrated flood risk assessment. From the above conceptual bases, two key tasks arise: (1) establishing a basic spatial unit for preliminary flood risk assessment and (2) specifying its attributes in relation to flo...

Landslides are one of the most frequently occurring natural global hazards which threatens human activities in the landscape. This paper employs a landslide hazard assessment in the Košická kotlina basin, Eastern Slovakia, where the State Geological Institute of Dionýz Štúr registered 1 233 landslides within an area of 328 km2. Lithological conditi...

This study aims to analyze and assess studies published from 1992 to 2019 and listed in the Web of Science (WOS) and Current Contents (CC) databases, and to identify agricultural abandonment by application of remote sensing (RS) optical and microwave data. We selected 73 studies by applying structured queries in a field tag form and Boolean operato...

We employed integrated methods to assess the landslide movement in Sv. Anton town in the Western Carpathians Neogene Volcanic Field (Central Slovakia). The integrated diagnostics required study of the landslide kinematic activity by a combination of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) imaging from...

This study presents evolution monitoring of the chute cutoff in the meander bend of the Ondava River in Eastern Slovakia. An avulsion channel was formed in the central part of meander neck during 2010 flood events, and the consequent morphological changes were examined by close range aerial imaging. Initial monitoring commenced on June 15th 2012 wi...

The changes in river morphology result from several factors such as climate, human interventions, lithology or land use and land cover changes. This paper shows morphological changes of two different river systems (braided-wandering of Belá and sinuous gravel bed of Ondava) over the last 60 years as a response to changes of land use, flood events d...

Mountain stream gravel is very often legally and illegally mined and gravel is removed from river beds sometimes on the very large scale which is disastrous for fluvial situation of rivers, for river ecology and river engineering works done for flood protection such as river revetments, bridges and all hydraulic structures. This situation makes a b...

This paper presents results from monitoring the chute cutoff in the meander bend of the Ondava River in Eastern Slovakia. An avulsion channel was formed in the central part of the meander neck during 2010 flood events, and here we describe the mechanism of evolution and post‐cutoff avulsion channel adjustment using drones, unmanned aerial vehicle (...

The aim of this paper is to present the possibilities of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) as photogrammetry payload carriers for data acquisition and fluvial landform identification and mapping. The manual and automatic classification of the Belá River riparian zone for landscape object identification and the analyses of the point cloud density afte...

The paper deals with the usage of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in the field of physical geography and geosciences. It begins with a short historical overview of the UAV development, continues with an introduction of an unmanned aerial vehicle as a tool for geosciences and also outlines a legislation of the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic...

The article presents the postflood period coarse sediment connectivity (CSC) assessment approach on the basis of the holistic ideas of the interpretation of the long-term CSC in river channels. Seven sets of remote sensing data (1949–2009) were used as the basic information sources to study the CSC along the braided-wandering Belá River by using th...

This paper presents the template for high-resolution mapping of a river landscape by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology with the following five steps: (i) reconnaissance of the mapped site; (ii) pre-flight field work; (iii) flight mission; (iv) quality check and processing of aerial data; and (v) operations above the processed layers and land...

The paper aims to the identification of the recent channel planform evolution of the braided-wandering Belá River using multitemporal data analyses of channel parameters in GIS (river active zone width, channel number, island number and mid-channel bar number) within consecutive 100-m-long channel segments (227 in total) for seven time horizons (19...

Main aim of the paper was inundation 2D modelling of gravel-bed and lateral dynamic Topľa River in flysch Western Carpathians. Results points to 473.20 ha of flooded area during flood event from 2010 with recurrence interval 100 years. Average water depth on floodplain in the river channel was 0.7 m and 2.8 m. Extent of the inundation during one-ye...

This study presents spatial analysis of agricultural landscape changes in the Podolie and Častkovce cadastral areas since 1949. Data for analysis was obtained from historical aerial photographs (from 1949, 1986 and 2006), detailed field mapping and Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) monitoring. Land cover changes were assessed from the aerial p...

Assessing the accuracy of photogrammetrically-derived digital elevation models (DEMs) from UAV is essential in many geoscience disciplines. The suitability of different DEM devised for slope stability assessment was evaluated in the example of the landslide in Svätý Anton village in Slovakia. Aerial data was acquired during a one-day field campaign...

The bank erosion area, rate of bank retreat and overall geomorphological and financial effects of channel migration due to recent flood events (over the time span 1987–2009) are identified using remotely sensed data and GIS. A 39 km-long reach of the meandering, gravel bed Topľa River (Flysch Slovak Carpathians) was selected as the study area. Base...

Changes in the morphological pattern of the gravel-bed Belá River, Slovak Carpathians, were investigated to infer about the impact of flood events and environmental changes on the evolutionary trend of the river since the mid-twentieth century. The post-flood period serial geomorphic analysis (POPSEGA) approach coupled with GIS analysis was used to...

One of the key factors affecting the behaviour of a river channel is extreme discharge, which increases the energy of the stream. It leads to the intensification of erosion and deposition processes in the channel and floodplain. The aim of this paper is to identify bank erosion, geomorphological effects of channel migration in the riparian zone of...

The typical morphological response of the meandering rivers to large floods is the lateral shift of their channel which triggers the formation of a new morphological structure from the initial destruction by erosion over deposition of new sediments and stabilization of vegetation. The article deals with the effect of extreme flood events on lateral...

Low-cost micro UAV technologies in geography (a new method of spatial data collection) The aim of this paper is to present the possibility of using the micro UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technology in geographical research. An UAV can carry a wide range of sensors – such as camera, camcorder – spectral camera, LI-DAR, sensor of temperature, humidi...

The aim of this study is to outline the geomorphic/sedimentary responses of three Slovak river systems of different character (a non-channelized meandering gravel-bed river, a mixed-bedrock headwater river, and a channelized section of a large alluvial river) to extreme flood events. Lateral channel shifts and the spatial variability of channel lan...

The aim of this paper is to present the possibility of using the micro UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technology in geographical research. An UAV can carry a wide range of sensors - such as camera, camcorder - spectral camera, LIDAR, sensor of temperature, humidity or chemical gas analysers - depending on the load capacity of devices. Micro UAV tech...

The present time is characterized by impacts of climate change on natural landscapes as well as on human activities. Increasing magnitude and frequency of flood events results in morphological and morphodynamic changes of river channels. It is a challenge for the fluvial geomorphology to highlight the morphological response to these events, because...

The recent period is characterized by impacts of climate change. Increasing magnitude and frequency of flood events results in morphological and morphodynamical changes of river channels. It is a challenge for the fluvial geomorphology to highlight the morphological response to these events, because the knowledge of the morphological-sedimentologic...

Research of braided rivers in fluvial geomorphology, particularly the partial themes of interaction between the channel morphology, water flow-stage, sediment transport, bar evolution and vegetation in braided rivers are frequent in specialised literature. These issues can be successfully investigated by a suitable selection of methods for the comp...

The paper discusses the changes in channel planform and lateral shift of two medium-energy river channels (the Topľa River – from Bardejov to Giraltovce, the length 39,8 km and the Ondava River from Stropkov to the Domaša waterwork, the length 13,2 km) based on multitemporal aerial photographs analysis (1984, 2003, 2009) of channel in GIS enviro...