Detailed project information

Large-scale flooding in Eastern Europe forms dramatic constraints for the future economic development of the region. Apart from the excess of water, the hinterland also delivers large quantities of sediment, which accumulates in downstream reservoirs or forms problems in the fairway. To understand the processes of water and sediment generation in the headwaters of the major waterways it is important to look at these processes on a scale that is large enough to be representative of the processes involved and small enough to be homogeneous and thus allow unambiguous results.

In south-eastern Poland a meso-scale catchment was selected to conduct an investigation involving the interaction between land use and sediment and water delivery. The determining factors influencing the sediment and water delivery from this meso-scale headwater catchment will be assessed. The selected catchment is an ideal research area as it has multiple land uses, and has a reservoir, where the sedimentation history of the catchment can be linked to the changes in land use in the region.

Historical land-use maps, a long hydrological record and the available sediment database in the downstream reservoir allow the development of an ArcGIS-based sediment delivery model with a strong hydrological and a snowmelt component. This physically based model will be able to compute sediment delivery from a meso-scale catchment at any selected time-step.

A thorough geomorphologic and ecological survey of the riverine habitat will be the basis of several land-use scenarios to calculate possible ecologically friendly solutions to reduce the sediment delivery to the main channel and to retard the flood wave in the meso-scale headwater catchments.

Keywords: Meso-scale catchments, GIS-based sediment delivery model, flood risk and sediment delivery reduction, nature conservation, Poland