Abstract
Flood-protection levees have been built along rivers and coastlines globally. Current datasets, however, are generally confined to territorial boundaries (national datasets) and are not always easily accessible, posing limitations for hydrologic models and assessments of flood hazard. Here we present our work to develop a single, open-source global river delta levee data environment (openDELvE) which aims to bridge a data deficiency by collecting and standardising global flood-protection levee data for river deltas. In openDELvE we have aggregated data from national databases as well as data stored in reports, maps, and satellite imagery. The database identifies the river delta land areas that the levees have been designed to protect, and where additional data is available, we record the extent and design specifications of the levees themselves (e.g., levee height, crest width, construction material) in a harmonised format. openDELvE currently contains 5,089 km of levees on deltas, and 44,733.505 km2 of leveed area in 1,601 polygons. For the 152 deltas included in openDELvE, on average 19 % of their habitable land area is confined by verifiable flood-protection levees. Globally, we estimate that between 5 % and 54 % of all delta land is confined by flood-protection levees. The data is aligned to the recent standards of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse of scientific data (FAIR) and is open-source. openDELvE is made public on an interactive platform (www.opendelve.eu), which includes a community-driven revision tool to encourage inclusion of new levee data and continuous improvement and refinement of open-source levee data.
Highlights
For the 152 deltas included in openDELvE, on average 19% of their habitable land area is confined by verifiable flood-protection levees
We estimate that between 5% and 54% of all delta land is confined by flood-protection levees
The data is aligned to the recent 20 standards of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse of scientific data (FAIR) and is open-source. openDELvE is made public on an interactive platform, which includes a community-driven revision tool to encourage inclusion of new levee data and continuous improvement and refinement of open-source levee data
Summary
25 Levees are banks of sediment or artificial material that prevent water from entering areas where it is not desirable They are common in deltas and protect their populations and urban areas, including floodplains, from water level fluctuations of rivers and the sea. Deltas in particular are at risk to be locked-in (Santos and Dekker, 2020), as areas become sediment starved and cease to keep up with sea level rise (Pinter et al, 2016) Another example of the negative effect of levees is in Australia, where undocumented private levees intending to protect land, resulted in degradation of the floodplain ecosystem, and contributed to flash flood risk by disconnecting the floodplain and channel (Steinfeld et al, 2013).
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