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Floodplains provides an overview of floodplains and their management in temperate regions. It synthesizes decades of research on floodplain ecosystems, explaining hydrologic, geomorphic, and ecological processes and how under appropriate management these processes can provide benefits to society ranging from healthy fish populations to flood-risk reduction. Drawing on the framework of reconciliation ecology, the authors explore how new concepts for floodplain ecosystem restoration and management can increase these benefits. Additionally, they use case studies from California's Central Valley and other temperate regions to show how innovative management approaches are reshaping rivers and floodplains around the world.

Extreme floods cause enormous damage in floodplains, which levees cannot prevent. Therefore, it is vital for spatial planning to provide space for water retention in these areas. Land use planners, water management agencies, landowners, and policymakers all agree on this challenge, but attempts to make the space for rivers to provide retention are generally not very successful. Adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach, this book examines how society can manage the use of the floodplains along rivers in the face of extreme floods, focusing in particular on the relation between social arrangements and the elemental forces of floods. The book firstly analyses why contemporary floodplain management is so often clumsy and ineffective by looking at various real-life situations in Germany, using Cultural Theory to provide a much-needed, but previously neglected social perspective. These analyses show a pattern of activity resulting from different rationalities which dominate the floodplains in different phases. During extreme floods, it is rational to manage floodplains as dangerous areas; sandbags and disaster management dominate the scene. After some time, the rationality of control takes over the floodplain management; policymakers discuss flood risk and water managers build levees. When public attention diminishes, floodplains become inconspicuous until more and more stakeholders regard floodplains as profitable land. The current system of planning, law, and property rights even encourages stakeholders to act out their plural rationalities. A permanent dynamic imbalance of different rationalities leads to a robust social construction of the floodplains which results in viable but clumsy floodplains. In the course of time, however, the patterns of activity in the floodplains lead to an increase in intensity and frequency of extreme floods, and to more vulnerable potential damages in the floodplains. Risk increases. Coping with this situation needs another ki

Land use–land cover (LULC) change in space and time is the main cause behind the changing hydrological processes, ecosystem and environment in urban catchments. In the present study, the main focus was on evaluation of spatial and temporal variation of land use and land cover change in a major coastal urban catchment of Mumbai City, India, called Mithi River catchment. The LULC is derived from the topographic map surveyed in the year 1966 and satellite image for the year 2009. The analysis from toposheet and remote sensing data showed that there is a rise in the built-up area of Mithi River catchment, Mumbai by 59.66 % between 1966 and 2009. It also showed adverse human-induced influences on the Mithi River course and its catchment. Flood hydrographs for different land use conditions were derived by using Soil Conservation Service-Curve Number hydrological model and kinematic wave model, for routing available within the HEC-HMS software. Flood plain maps as well as flood hazard maps for the different land use scenarios have been developed by integrating the models HEC-HMS and HEC-RAS with HEC-GeoHMS and HEC-GeoRAS as well as with GIS and remote sensing. Results obtained from the present study revealed marginal increases in the runoff peak discharges and volumes within the catchment. Even though the runoff change is marginal, combined with tidal influence, it may cause major flooding problem. The integrated modeling approach has been found to be very effective for flood estimation, flood plain and flood hazard mapping. The flood plain and flood hazard maps derived can be used as effective tool to minimize the damages within the flood-prone areas of the river basin for the Mumbai City.

Flood inundation models enable us to make hazard predictions for floodplains, mitigating increasing flood fatalities and losses. This book provides an understanding of hydraulic modelling and floodplain dynamics, with a key focus on state-of-the-art remote sensing data, and methods to estimate and communicate uncertainty. Academic researchers in the fields of hydrology, climate change, environmental science and natural hazards, and professionals and policy-makers working in flood risk mitigation, hydraulic engineering and remote sensing will find this an invaluable resource. This volume is the third in a collection of four books on flood disaster management theory and practice within the context of anthropogenic climate change. The others are: Floods in a Changing Climate: Extreme Precipitation by Ramesh Teegavarapu, Floods in a Changing Climate: Hydrological Modeling by P. P. Mujumdar and D. Nagesh Kumar and Floods in a Changing Climate: Risk Management by Slodoban Simonović.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps portray the height and extent to which flooding is expected to occur, and they form the basis for setting flood insurance premiums and regulating development in the floodplain. As such, they are an important tool for individuals, businesses, communities, and government agencies to understand and deal with flood hazard and flood risk. Improving map accuracy is therefore not an academic question-better maps help everyone. Making and maintaining an accurate flood map is neither simple nor inexpensive. Even after an investment of more than $1 billion to take flood maps into the digital world, only 21 percent of the population has maps that meet or exceed national flood hazard data quality thresholds. Even when floodplains are mapped with high accuracy, land development and natural changes to the landscape or hydrologic systems create the need for continuous map maintenance and updates. Mapping the Zone examines the factors that affect flood map accuracy, assesses the benefits and costs of more accurate flood maps, and recommends ways to improve flood mapping, communication, and management of flood-related data.

QUESTION: How does the species composition and functional structure of flood‐meadows change over time during a period with strong variations in flooding frequency and height? LOCATION: Flood‐meadows at the northern Upper Rhine, Germany. METHODS: From 1998 to 2004 annually, and again in 2008, species composition and above‐ground biomass were studied in 46 permanent plots located along a flooding gradient ranging from frequently flooded Magnocaricion to rarely flooded Arrhenaterion meadows. The plots were situated in the functional floodplain (natural) and in the fossil floodplain on the land side of high winter levees (anthropogenic altered). Temporal variation of the functional structure was analysed based on community‐weighted mean traits. RESULTS: Productivity and functional structure varied markedly over the study period and between the functional and fossil floodplain. During the study period two contrasting extreme events occurred: a summer flood in 1999 and a drought period after 2003. After the flood in 1999, species composition and functional structure of the studied flood‐meadows shifted towards the species composition of wetter sites. Flooding reduced species richness in the functional floodplain, but not in the fossil floodplain. CONCLUSIONS: Flood‐meadows in the Upper Rhine fully recover from extreme disturbance events within a time frame of less than 10 yr. Environmental fluctuations and disturbances, enabling the co‐existence of species with contrasting ecological requirements are a key factor for the preservation of plant biodiversity in flood‐meadows.

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region's waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers' heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

This report offers policy recommendations to increase participation in buyoutprograms and to make them more effective tools for building resilience in coastalcommunities. Based on a study of managed retreat following Hurricanes Irene andSandy, the report provides an overview of flooding risk, a detailed summation ofexisting buyout programs, case studies, and interviews.

Recently, community ecologists are focusing on the relative importance of local environmental factors and proxies to dispersal limitation to explain spatial variation in community structure. Albeit less explored, temporal processes may also be important in explaining species composition variation in metacommunities occupying dynamic systems. We aimed to evaluate the relative role of environmental, spatial and temporal variables on the metacommunity structure of different organism groups in the Upper Paraná River floodplain (Brazil). We used data on macrophytes, fish, benthic macroinvertebrates, zooplankton, periphyton, and phytoplankton collected in up to 36 habitats during a total of eight sampling campaigns over two years. According to variation partitioning results, the importance of predictors varied among biological groups. Spatial predictors were particularly important for organisms with comparatively lower dispersal ability, such as aquatic macrophytes and fish. On the other hand, environmental predictors were particularly important for organisms with high dispersal ability, such as microalgae, indicating the importance of species sorting processes in shaping the community structure of these organisms. The importance of watercourse distances increased when spatial variables were the main predictors of metacommunity structure. The contribution of temporal predictors was low. Our results emphasize the strength of a trait-based analysis and of better defining spatial variables. More importantly, they supported the view that \"all-or-nothing\" interpretations on the mechanisms structuring metacommunities are rather the exception than the rule.

This study systematically reviews the diverse body of research on community flood risk management in the USA to identify knowledge gaps and develop innovative and practical lessons to aid flood management decision-makers in their efforts to reduce flood losses. The authors discovered and reviewed 60 studies that met the selection criteria (e.g., study is written in English, is empirical, focuses on flood risk management at the community level in the USA, etc.). Upon reviewing the major findings from each study, the authors identified seven practical lessons that, if implemented, could not only help flood management decision-makers better understand communities’ flood risks, but could also reduce the impacts of flood disasters and improve communities’ resilience to future flood disasters. These seven lessons include: (1) recognizing that acquiring open space and conserving wetlands are some of the most effective approaches to reducing flood losses; (2) recognizing that, depending on a community’s flood risks, different development patterns are more effective at reducing flood losses; (3) considering the costs and benefits of participating in FEMA’s Community Rating System program; (4) engaging community members in the flood planning and recovery processes; (5) considering socially vulnerable populations in flood risk management programs; (6) relying on a variety of floodplain management tools to delineate flood risk; and (7) ensuring that flood mitigation plans are fully implemented and continually revised.