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Regionalizing Flood Magnitudes using Landscape Structural Patterns of Catchments

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Abstract

Emerging as an important issue in the disciplines of landscape ecology and landscape hydrology which inspired it, defining the concept of landscape metrics in a hydrological context has become a challenge to both landscape planners and engineers. Accordingly, the present study addresses the relationships existing between flooding phenomena and landscape metrics (shape index, fractal dimension index, perimeter-area ratio, related circumscribing circle, and contiguity index) of land use/land cover, hydrological soil groups and geological permeability classes. A regionalization approach was adopted employing 39 select catchments (33—4800 km2 in area, 0.47—21 m3 s−1 in mean discharge), located within the southern basin of the Caspian Sea. These catchments were predominantly covered by forest (57.4%), while rangeland, farmland and urban areas accounted for 25.9%, 11.7%, and 1.6%, respectively. Class-level landscape structural metrics of land use/land cover, hydrological soil groups and geological permeability classes have then been served as inputs to stepwise multiple linear regression analysis in an attempt to explain the flood magnitudes. The regression models (0.69 ≤ r2 ≤ 0.84) suggested that the catchments’ flood magnitude could explicitly be predicted using average measure of the shape and related circumscribing circle indices for the land use/land cover classes and those of hydrologic soil groups and geological permeability classes of the catchments. This indicated that regularity (vs. irregularity) of the landscape, pedoscape, and lithoscape, as represented by the shape index as well as the circumscribing circle index (for elongation and convolution), explained 69–84% of the variation in the flood magnitudes in the catchment.

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Acknowledgements

The first author (B.J.A.) acknowledges that the present study has financially been supported through visiting professor fellowship which has been awarded by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran

    Bahman Jabbarian Amiri & Gao Junfeng

  2. Key Laboratory of Watershed Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 73 East Beijing Road, Nanjing, 210008, China

    Bahman Jabbarian Amiri & Gao Junfeng

  3. Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, Institute for Nature Conservation and Resource Management, Christian Albrecht Universitaet zu Kiel, Olshausenstr., 75, 24098, Kiel, Germany

    Nicola Fohrer

  4. Department of Ecosystem Management, Institute for Nature Conservation and Resource Management, Christian Albrecht Universitaet zu Kiel, Olshausenstr., 75, 24098, Kiel, Germany

    Felix Mueller

  5. Department of Bioresource Engineering, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec, H9X 3V9, Canada

    Jan Adamowski

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  1. Bahman Jabbarian Amiri
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  2. Gao Junfeng
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  3. Nicola Fohrer
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  4. Felix Mueller
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  5. Jan Adamowski
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Correspondence to Bahman Jabbarian Amiri.

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Amiri, B.J., Junfeng, G., Fohrer, N. et al. Regionalizing Flood Magnitudes using Landscape Structural Patterns of Catchments. Water Resour Manage 32, 2385–2403 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-018-1935-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-018-1935-3

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