Geo-analysis of Landscape Level Degradation and Natural Risk Formation under Uncertainty: A Case Study of Selected Czech Urban Watercourses

Abstract

Rivers and streams in urban areas are losing their natural environ-mental qualities. A lack of river management and insufficient interest on the part of municipal authorities has become the norm, especially in the case of small watercourses. Here, an interdisciplinary approach to landscape-level degradation is applied to selected catchments in the Czech Republic (the streams known as the Lačnovský and the Leskava). This approach includes basic geographical approaches to the quantification of the relationship between anthropogenic pressure and ecological stability. The methods employed include hy-dromorphological field research, identification of changes in land use, and an inventory of anthropogenic landforms. The existence of urban stream syndrome was established in model catchments. Parameters for these areas were compared with values for susceptibility to natural risk and preliminary results show a spatial pattern consistent with the areas at most risk also being prone to flooding. The observations were subjected to cartographic visualization and enriched with thematic and temporal uncertainty features, thus refining the results and highlighting any ambiguity. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.