Natural Flood Management

Flooding is an environmental hazard that can have major negative impacts on our local communities and environment. With climate change it is believed that storm events will become more frequent and it is likely that flooding will occur more often, so we need to be looking in to new and innovative ways to create flood resilient communities and look at the hydrological cycle at river catchment scale.

Natural Flood Management (NFM) focuses on how we can use our understanding of the natural processes occurring in the catchment to mitigate against severe flooding downstream, in the often more urbanised and populated areas. It is a management method most appealing to rural areas where there are small, flashy (quick responding) river catchments, and are home to one or more smaller villages that suffer from regular flooding.

Geospatial data can help us with NFM during an initial desktop environmental analysis study by identifying key features within the catchment, and understanding the physical landscape, which can then support the development of hydraulic modelling and scenario testing for potential mitigation measures.

The data we have looked at up until now has made a good start to our environmental analysis, but recognise the more data you can include the more thorough and detailed your study will be. By working with multiple datasets from varied legitimate sources, you can improve your modelling accuracy, and ultimately lead you to making more confident decisions on what NFM options you think would work best, and where they will have most impact.

This story map has been created using the following data:

• OS NGD Water - Water Features - River Basin District Catchment
• OS NGD Land - Land Features - Land
• OS NGD Land Use - Land Use Features - Site
• OS MasterMap Networks - Water Layer
• Terrain 50
• AddressBase Core

• Environment Agency Flood Map for Planning Rivers and Sea Flood Zone 2 & 3
• Environment Agency LiDAR DTM 2m

Further detail about these can be found on the  OS website product  pages.

The logo in the top left of this story map will take you to the main OS website homepage.

More story map examples like this once can be found in the  More Than Maps  site.