Natural Flood Management (NFM): Linking science to local landscapes


In 2019/2020 the LANDWISE of workshops with Catchment Partnerships across the Thames Valleys to create catchment scale scenarios for natural flood management (NFM) that reflected the type of measures the local community and organisations wanted to see.

As LANDWISE enters its final year, we want to feedback how the knowledge shared by Catchment Partnerships in the Thames Valleys has been used to inform NFM mapping and computer simulation models.  The aim is to share what we have been up to with all the data we gathered at the workshop back in 2019/20, how this has been used and listen to your views on this work. Your feedback will help us to prepare the final outputs from the project so the work can be useful to your community, organisation, group and others.

Workshops to be run over Dec-Jan 2021-22

  • Upper Thames, 2 December 2021
  • Pang and Lambourn, 8 December 2021
  • Loddon, January 2022 date to be confirmed
  • Ock, 2022 date to be confirmed

Background information

Ahead of the workshops, we’ve prepared some short videos to recap on the work that has been done from previous workshop on NFM scenarios and to explain some of the methods behind the model results that we will share in the workshop. The idea here is to provide some information to help participants choose which breakout session they would like to join before the meeting. And to help free up meeting time for discussion by providing some of the general context before hand that may only be of interest to a few participants.

Video 1: Overview to project and NFM Scenarios

Joanna Clark provides an overview to the Landwise project, recaps what was done at the earlier workshops on NFM scenarios and explains how this links to different types of modelling explained in the videos below. Useful background for all workshop participants.

Video 2: Field scale modelling of different land use and management on different soil types

Anne Verhoef explains how the SWAP model is being used to look what happens to rainfall, infiltration, evapotranspiration and ground water recharge in fields under different land use (arable, grassland, woodland) and for different types of management (farming systems and crop types). She considers how the type of soils affect the movement and storage or water. Useful for farmers, farm advisors and people interested in the topic.

Video 3: Comparing different NFM measures in small clay catchments

Ryan Jennings explains how the Jflow model was used to test three different types of NFM measures in small catchments dominated by clay soils and surface runoff. Measures compared are leaky barriers, woodlands and soil and land management. Looking at spatial coverage of different measures and comparing technical map recommendation with local preferences from earlier LANDWISE workshops.

Video 4: Medium catchments with clay and groundwater

Maleki Badjana explains how the SWAT model can be used to look at how land surface properties affect river flows in clay and groundwater dominated catchments. Technical scenarios and scenarios from earlier LANDWISE workshops will be tested in this modelling work.

Video 5: Medium to large groundwater dominated catchments

Sarah Collins explains how groundwater dominated systems, like the Cotswolds, are modelled. This work draws on technical scenarios and LANDWISE workshop scenarios.