Data used for GIS-based Flood Susceptibility Mapping

Abstract

The dramatic increase in flood incidents as a significant threat to human life and property, environment, and infrastructure indicates the necessity of mapping spatial distribution of flood susceptible areas to reduce destructive effects of flooding. During the last decade, the integration of the geographic information system (GIS) with the remote sensing data provide efficient means to generate a more reliable and precise flood susceptibility map. The present study contains a review of 200 articles on the application of GIS-based methods in indicating flood vulnerable areas. The papers were reviewed in terms of influential variables, study area, and the number of articles published in the last 10 years. The review shows that the number of studies has increased since 2012. The total study areas covered 39 countries that were mostly located in Asia where the major developments and infrastructures have been constructed in the floodplains. The most common study areas was Iran (44 articles, 22%), followed by India (26 articles, 13%), China (26 articles, 11%), and Vietnam (15 articles, 7.5%). More than 90 variables were considered to map flood susceptible areas that the top 5 widely used flood conditioning factor are slope (98% of total articles), followed by elevation (92% of total articles), land use/land cover (79.5% of total articles), distance to the river (76.5% of total articles), and rainfall (73% of total articles). The review implies that many natural and anthropogenic factors affect flooding and the combination of both groups of factors is necessary to accurately detect and map flood-prone parts of the study area.

Keywords

• data
• systematic literature review
• gis
• flood
• susceptibility map