Tackling landscape scale pressures on in-stream water quality and flood risk: Predicting and simulating hydrological connectivity
Date:
To tackle the challenges of flood risk, poor water quality and degraded ecological health, there is a need to go beyond the management of point pressures and take a full landscape view of the problem. Central to this high level view is the concept of hydrological connectivity, which describes the ease with which water and associated materials, can move across the landscape to the rivers or lakes. Therefore, understanding connectivity and the spatial pattern of source areas is key to making predictions of the critical source areas for diffuse pollution and flood risk sources and this identification allows for the spatial targeting of mitigation measures in the landscape.
This seminar will present two different analysis approaches to considering the critical sources areas in the landscape. The first the SCIMAP diffuse pollution risk mapping framework. SCIMAP uses a minimal information requirement approach to make predicts of the parts of the landscape that probably export material that effects the in-stream water quality. SCIMAP has been applied to many catchments in the UK for issues associated with fine sediment, particulate phosphorus and nitrogen. The second approach uses a fully distributed catchment hydrological model, CRUM3, to simulate the hydrological flows. This model has been used to identify floodwater source areas within catchments and to inform the location of natural flood risk reduction measures.