Abstract. In recent years, flood management has shifted from protection against floods to managing the risks of floods. In Europe, this shift is reflected in the Flood risk directive of October 2007 (2007/60/EC; FRD). The FRD requires EU Member States to undertake a preliminary assessment of flood risks and, for areas with a significant flood risk, to prepare flood hazard and flood risk maps and flood risk management plans. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the FRD and discuss the challenges that the FRD poses to research. These challenges include the issue how to define and measure ''flood risk'', the selection of alternatives to be assessed, coping with uncertainty, risk communication, nurturing trust and promoting collaboration. These research challenges cannot be addressed properly within any single discipline and without involving the flood risk managers and other stakeholders. The paper therefore concludes that there is a large need for interdisciplinary and participatory research. This constitutes in fact the biggest research challenge.

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First-level inspections could be provided by skilled volunteers or technicians to pre-screen the functional status of check dams. This paper discusses the design and testing of a support method in collaboration with the responsible technicians in evaluating inspection reports. Reports are based on linguistic rating scales that are systematically aggregated into indices by means of a multi-criteria TOPSIS method with fuzzy terms. The aggregation procedure is carried out for three parameters representing the structure's status while highlighting any lack of completeness of inspection reports. The method was evaluated using inspection reports collected during a workshop in the Fella basin in the Italian Alps. The method allows the responsible technicians to set rules to categorise the aggregated indices in one of three levels, each corresponding with a course of action. Rules were useful to categorise the aggregated indices according to the structure's status. Disagreements on rating defects suggest that a weighted aggregation procedure to calculate the indices might lead to overestimating or underestimating defects. Complementary data from historical inspections or remote sensing are required to initiate specific actions. The method can be applied to pre-screen different types of hydraulic structures after adaptation to the local conditions and functional requirements.

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