Exploring the desirability of forest landscapes in a natural flood management context

Throughout history forest landscapes have been valued by people and societies in a variety of ways.
Recently, attention has turned to the potential role of forests as part of landscape-scale flood
management, as part of a new “natural flood management” paradigm. This values forests as a
complementary part of wider scale flood alleviation. Recent studies have shown the potential
effectiveness of large scale forests (greater than 10% of the catchment area) in substantially
attenuating flood waves at a catchment scale (e.g. Dixon et al., 2016). However, the extent to which
land management plans involving such extensive forest cover are palatable to a diverse range of
stakeholders, including land owners/managers, remains unknown.

This research sets out to explore
i) the social acceptability and feasibility of optimally designed forest planting for flood attenuation
and ii) the flood attenuation capacity of forested landscape designs that accord with, and are
sensitive to a diverse set of stakeholder values and interests. In other words, the research sets out to
explore the compatibility of a flood-centric approach and preference-centric approach to forested
landscape design. Since it is anticipated that there will be at least some incongruence between these
two ideal-type designs the research will also explore the potential (and mechanisms) for seeking and
achieving a compromise between these positions and among the various stakeholders. This project
will utilise a unique multi-disciplinary approach with numerical modelling of flood risk coupled with
participatory interviews and multi-criteria evaluation to examine the opportunities and barriers to
implementation of forest based natural flood management.

The objectives are
1. Produce Model(s) of optimal forest cover within the study catchment to maximise flood
attenuation
2. Explore the values and preferences in and for forested landscapes vis-à-vis other landscape types
among land-owners and stakeholders within the study catchment.
3. Seek the reaction of land-owners and other stakeholders to flood models/landscape simulation
images designed for optimal flood attenuation
4. Use Multi-criteria evaluation to design alternative forest landscapes which satisfy diverse
stakeholder preferences
5. Model the flood attenuation benefits of proposed alternative strategies based on diverse
stakeholder preferences and compare the effectiveness of these strategies.

1. Numerical flood modelling assess changes in flood impacts with land use at a catchment scale.
Using an exploratory modelling framework assess a number of optimum forest cover scenarios for
maximum flood risk reductions.
2. Semi-structured interviews with land-owners and other stakeholders on forest values and
preferences
3. Discussion with land-owners (and other stakeholders) on optimal flood model forested landscapes
4. Multi-criteria evaluation with diverse stakeholders on preferences for forested landscapes in
varying configurations and extents.
5. Map stakeholder preferences for forest cover and model these for effectiveness in terms of flood
attenuation, comparing these back to idealised scenarios from initial modelling exercise.