Flood Risk of Grasslands in the Mountain Area of Western Romania

Abstract

Floods, some of the most destructive natural phenomena, are occurring with increasing frequency, against the backdrop of climate change in recent years. Floods affect both built spaces and natural areas, implicitly the lands used as grasslands. In the context outlined above, the purpose of this study is to identify grasslands susceptible to being affected by floods and to group and map them according to the intensity of the manifestation of the flood risk. For the flood risk assessment, both for the entire analyzed area and for the grassland areas, in the GIS environment, seven factors (spatialized in raster format) determining the occurrence of floods were taken into account: land use, altitude, slope, drainage density, rainfall, distance to rivers and distance to roads. The flood vulnerability map of the analyzed territory, implicitly of the grassland areas, obtained by summing up and the weighted participation of the seven variables, was reclassified into five risk classes/areas: no risk or very low risk, low risk, medium risk, high risk and very high risk. It has been shown that the most vulnerable are the surfaces located on land with low slopes, located at low altitudes and in the proximity of water courses. Regarding the areas of grasslands, 50% fall into the classes without flood risk, with very low and low risk, 28% in the moderate risk class, 16% present a high risk and 6% of the grasslands are classified in the risk class very high to floods. From the point of view of practical applicability, it is important to identify and map the grasslands at risk of flooding, so that measures can be taken to mitigate the destructive effects.