The ecological impacts of flooding - developing a methodology

This project developed methods and tools for understanding how different flood scenarios would affect the natural environment.

From:
Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme and Environment Agency
Published
22 February 2021
Category:
Environmental management and sustainability
Topics:
Flood costs, Incident management, Natural capital and Recovery
Project status:
Completed
Project code:
SC060062
Date of completion:
31 March 2014

Documents

If you wish to view the final report, please email: [email protected].

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Details

This project was designed to assess how flooding affects the natural environment. It investigated how sensitive certain habitats were to flooding, and developed a tool for understanding the effects of a range of different flood scenarios.

This project brought together information from existing science to provide a framework for decision-making. It provided a way of assessing the ecological impacts of flooding that can be applied at any scale, and developed a methodology and tools. The spreadsheet tool was designed to be used to determine the positive and negative ecological impacts of current and future coastal and river flooding scenarios.

The results of this project helped the Environment Agency fulfil its duties under the:

  • Habitats Directive
  • Birds Directive
  • Water Framework Directive

In 2014, the tools were assessed and recommendations were made for their future development, including:

  • an improvement of the methodology to take account of new laws and sources of data
  • making the tools more user-friendly by creating two layers of interactivity - one for users with a technical working knowledge of GIS software, and a set of geo-PDFs for users interested in the specific outputs

Further findings

The outputs of the original project and the 2014 review will be considered further when implementing future research and building future tools. For example, some of the recommendations could be used to support ecological impact assessments through further developing the ‘Modelling and Decision Support Framework (MDSF2) and communities at risk’ project. They could also inform the ‘Working with Natural Processes’ opportunity maps.

We are keen to hear more from others in the scientific community. The reports are available on request by emailing [email protected].

Updates to this page

Published 22 February 2021
Contents