Abstract
Abstract. Since the second half of the 17th century, tax relief has been available to farmers and landowners to offset flood damage to property (buildings) and land (fields, meadows, pastures, gardens) in South Moravia, Czech Republic. Historically, the written applications for this were supported by a relatively efficient bureaucratic process that left a clear data trail of documentation, preserved at several levels: in the communities affected, in regional offices, and in the Moravian Land Office, all of which are to be found in estate and family collections in the Moravian Land Archives in the city of Brno, the provincial capital. As well as detailed information about damage done and administrative responses to it, data are often preserved as to the flood event itself, the time of its occurrence and its impacts, sometimes together with causes and stages. The final flood database based on taxation records is used here to describe the temporal and spatial density of both flood events and the records themselves. The information derived is used to help create long-term flood chronologies for the rivers Dyje, Jihlava, Svratka and Morava, combining floods interpreted from taxation records with other documentary data and floods derived from later systematic hydrological measurements (water levels, discharges). Common periods of higher flood frequency appear largely in the periods 1821–1850 and 1921–1950, although this shifts to several other decades for individual rivers. A number of uncertainties are inseparable from flood data taxation records: their spatial and temporal incompleteness; the inevitable limitation to larger-scale damage and restriction to the summer half-year; and the different characters of rivers, including land-use changes and channel modifications. Taxation data have considerable potential for extending our knowledge of past floods for the rest of the Czech Republic, not to mention other European countries in which records have survived.
Highlights
Floods are among the most destructive natural phenomena in the Czech Republic, often leading to loss of human life and great material damage
The current paper addresses taxation records kept in the 17th–19th centuries as a source of data for the study of floods in South Moravia, Czech Republic (Fig. 1)
Flood information derived from taxation records was categorised by watercourse in South Moravia
Summary
Floods are among the most destructive natural phenomena in the Czech Republic, often leading to loss of human life and great material damage. 20 years, which were marked by several disastrous flood events: July 1997 (Matejícek, 1998; Matejícek and Hladný, 1999), July 1998 (Hancarová et al, 1999), August 2002 (Hladný et al, 2004, 2005), March–April 2006 (Brázdil and Kirchner, 2007), June–July 2009 (Danhelka and Kubát, 2009), May–June and August 2010 (Danhelka and Šercl, 2011) and June 2013 (Šercl et al, 2013). Just like the Czech Republic, many other European countries endured severe floods in the 1990s–2000s period Because of the coincidence of this period with recent climate change associated with global warming (Solomon et al, 2007; Stocker et al, 2013), the question seems to be how exceptional this higher flood activity may be in a longer-term context. Brázdil et al.: The use of taxation records in assessing historical floods in South Moravia
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