Mountain Watersheds, Torrents, and Torrent Control in Slovakia

Abstract

The Slovak Republic with an area of 49,035.81 km2 is in most of its territory a mountain landscape and has watercourses with a total length of 61,147 km. From this length, approximately 24,000 km (39.25%) have the character of torrents. The chapter deals with the issues of mountain watersheds, torrent control, and torrents which are in Slovakia in the length of 19,408 km managed by forestry organizations. The chapter provides basic information about Slovakia’s mountain watersheds and torrents and about the methods to the determination of watercourse type (river, brook, and torrent) through technical standards or calculation. The chapter includes the history of torrent control and torrent flash floods in mountain watersheds of Slovakia. Also, it deals with lessons from the history of flash floods. The chapter analyzes the discharge capacity of natural torrent beds in various geomorphologic units of Slovakia. A part of this chapter deals with forests in mountain watersheds and their impact on runoff formation and water balance of individual forest altitudinal vegetation zones of Slovakia. In a separate part, an example of water balance in mountain watersheds of the highest mountain of Slovakia (the High Tatras) is explained. Finally, we present the calculation procedure to the determination of T-yearly discharges in forestry practice in Slovakia.