Machine learning has already been proven as a powerful state-of-the-art technique for many non-linear applications, including environmental changes and climate predictions. Wetlands are among some of the most challenging and complex ecosystems for water level predictions. Wetland water level prediction is vital, as wetlands have their own permissible water levels. Exceeding these water levels can cause flooding and other severe environmental damage. On the other hand, the biodiversity of the wetlands is threatened by the sudden fluctuation of water levels. Hence, early prediction of water levels benefits in mitigating most of such environmental damage. However, monitoring and predicting the water levels in wetlands worldwide have been limited owing to various constraints. This study presents the first-ever application of deep machine-learning techniques (deep neural networks) to predict the water level in an urban wetland in Sri Lanka located in its capital. Moreover, for the first time in water level prediction, it investigates two types of relationships: the traditional relationship between water levels and environmental factors, including temperature, humidity, wind speed, and evaporation, and the temporal relationship between daily water levels. Two types of low load artificial neural networks (ANNs) were developed and employed to analyze two relationships which are feed forward neural networks (FFNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks, to conduct the comparison on an unbiased common ground. The LSTM has outperformed FFNN and confirmed that the temporal relationship is much more robust in predicting wetland water levels than the traditional relationship. Further, the study identified interesting relationships between prediction accuracy, data volume, ANN type, and degree of information extraction embedded in wetland data. The LSTM neural networks (NN) has achieved substantial performance, including R2 of 0.8786, mean squared error (MSE) of 0.0004, and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0155 compared to existing studies.

Wetlands play a vital role in ecosystems. They help in flood accumulation, water purification, groundwater recharge, shoreline stabilization, provision of habitats for flora and fauna, and facilitation of recreation activities. Although wetlands are hot spots of biodiversity, they are one of the most endangered ecosystems on the Earth. This is not only due to anthropogenic activities but also due to changing climate. Many studies can be found in the literature to understand the water levels of wetlands with respect to the climate; however, there is a lack of identification of the major meteorological parameters affecting the water levels, which are much localized. Therefore, this study, for the first time in Sri Lanka, was carried out to understand the most important parameters affecting the water depth of the Colombo flood detention basin. The temporal behavior of water level fluctuations was tested among various combinations of hydro-meteorological parameters with the help of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). As expected, rainfall was found to be the most impacting parameter; however, apart from that, some interesting combinations of meteorological parameters were found as the second layer of impacting parameters. The rainfall–nighttime relative humidity, rainfall–evaporation, daytime relative humidity–evaporation, and rainfall–nighttime relative humidity–evaporation combinations were highly impactful toward the water level fluctuations. The findings of this study help to sustainably manage the available wetlands in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In addition, the study emphasizes the importance of high-resolution on-site data availability for higher prediction accuracy.

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