Identification of areas with significant flood risk at the confluence of Danube and Ipeľ rivers (southern Slovakia)

Abstract

The village of Chľaba is located in the southwest Slovakia, bordered with the fork of Danube River and Ipeľ River and in the southeast foothill of Burda Mts. This creates a specific rural environment of a Slovak–Hungarian border area. Ministry of Environment of the Slovak republic did not include this village in the list of potential significant flood risk areas, despite the fact that during the time of extraordinary floods, the village of Chľaba is completely separated from the only functional access road. This leads to great damages on arable land plots in the inundation area and consequently to a significant soil erosion. This phenomenon takes place in the area of huge parcels, which are characterized by intensive agriculture activities and harvests. In the paper, we tried to identify the range of the flood affected areas during the time of extraordinary floods (June 2013) and to propose flood protection arrangements within the landscape utilization changes in affected areas. The article presents the resulting map of the sloped and under-flooding areas, based not only on a terrain identification by conventional methods of field research, but also on a comparison of real slopped areas in 2013 with prognostic flood hazard map and flood risk map created by the Danube Floodrisk project. In the conclusion, we propose landscape utilization changes, which could lead to more effective human activities applications in the cadastral territory of the Chľaba village. This attitude might reduce the negative impact of floods in the researched endangered territory.