Research

This research summarises the current methods and data sources available to help carry out an ecosystem service or natural capital assessment for flood and coastal erosion risk management and marine habitat restoration schemes. Based on a review of ecosystem service classification systems and previous studies, six key ecosystem services have been identified as significant benefit providing services in the marine environment. The outlined valuation techniques can be used to conduct a marine natural capital assessment. However, it is acknowledged that there are a number of factors that limit the applicability of this methodology in the marine environment and specifically for coastal management schemes. The most significant limitations are the lack of available data on the marine environment and the interconnected nature of marine ecosystem service delivery.

This report systematically assesses the effect of varying logjam spacing, extent of logjam-generated change in water surface profile, vertical height of lower gap, overflow to local floodplain, and varying channel slope, representing a series of logjams in a sparse input data 1D network model including the jam-generated backwater, which depends on loss of momentum within the jam.

This analysis explores the relationship between investment and surface water flood risk through to 2100, with a focus on the residual risks that may exist by the 2050s and the investment need for the period from present day to 2050.

This article has taken a distributed modelling approach to examine the potential for hillslope storage bunds as a natural flood management (NFM) strategy to mitigate the effects of downstream flooding if deployed extensively in the 209 km² River Kent catchment in Cumbria (UK).

Understanding the prevalence of storm clustering at inter- (between) and intra (within)-annual timescales around the UK coastline. Analysis was undertaken and compared using modelled hindcasts and recorded observations of wave conditions and sea levels.

This paper focusses on the development of a metric to quantify how well the generated flood maps for events compare to observed flooding from remote sensing.