Multicriteria Analysis for Flood Vulnerable Areas in Southeastern Slovakia

Year 2017, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 8 - 19, 01.12.2017

Martina Zelenakova , Peter Blistan Pavol Purcz Rastislav Fijko

Abstract

Floods are natural
phenomena which cannot be prevented. The causes of flooding are extremely heavy
rains or rapid melting of snow combined with a significantly reduced ability to
detain stormwater in areas. However the negative human-based factors cause
changes in runoff ratio and increase the risk of flooding. Human activities change flood
behavior in many circumstances. Activities in flood plains and catchment areas
such as land clearing for urbanization or agriculture, or construction of
infrastructure such as highways, roads and bridges across the flood plain may
increase the magnitude of flooding, which in turn increases the damage to property
and lives. Determining the flood vulnerable areas is important for decision
makers for planning and management activities. Multicriteria analysis methods
(MCA) are used to analyze the flood vulnerable areas. Geographical information
system (GIS) applications are used for managing, producing, analyzing and
combining spatial data. The aim in integrating MCA with GIS is to provide more
flexible and more accurate decisions to the decision makers in order to
evaluate the effective factors. Some of the causative factors for flooding in
watershed are taken into account as daily rainfall, size of watershed, land
use, slope and the type of soil. The selection of criteria that has spatial
reference is an important step in MCA. The objective of this article is to
analyze the flood vulnerability in Bodva river basin, eastern Slovakia. We
determined the flood-effective factors, estimate their significance and applied
two different approaches of MCA inside the GIS environment.

Keywords

analytical hierarchy process, causative factors, flood risk, geographical information system

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