Abstract
In recent years, flash floods have increased, accompanying rapid economic growth, changes to the natural environment and increases in extreme climate events. However, spatial heterogeneity in the influencing factors has seldom been studied systematically. This paper investigates this issue by using the Geodetector tool and considering 14 factors such as climate, natural environment, and human activities in 11 ecoregions in China based on flash flood records from 1950 to 2015 collected by the Investigation Project of Chinese Flash Floods. The results showed that there is obvious spatial heterogeneity in the main influencing factors and influencing weights in 11 ecoregions. Precipitation and landforms have the greatest effects on flash floods and the interactions of these two factors have the strongest effects as compared to interactions between other factors in most of the 11 ecoregions; however, the effect has obvious variation from northwest to Southeast. Meanwhile, human activities were found to have tangible impacts, especially in ecologically vulnerable regions. The findings provide a new understanding of how and why flash floods occur in a particular region and contribute to the formulation of regionally targeted strategies to cope with flash flood.
Highlights
A large body of research is devoted to understanding the spatial heterogeneity of natural conditions, human activities, and their interactions [1,2,3]
The Geodetector tool was developed based on geographical spatial differentiation theory by Wang [38].This tool is widely used in spatial analysis [39,40], and it is valuable for identifying association or overlaying between dependent variables and independent variables, according to the consistency of their spatial distributions [39,41]
Similar to the findings of other researchers [46,47], precipitation was found to be the most influential factor affecting the spatial distribution of flash floods (FFs), especially heavy precipitation, which was highly ranked, along with landforms (Table 3)
Summary
A large body of research is devoted to understanding the spatial heterogeneity of natural conditions, human activities, and their interactions [1,2,3]. Such insights are seldom applied to disaster studies, such as those on floods, which are becoming one of the most severe disasters due to climate change and human activities [4]. Characterized by the rapid onset of flooding, FFs are a result of complex interactions between humans and the natural environment [5] This is the case in China, where the frequency of FFs has increased in recent years owing to rapid economic growth, changes in the natural environment, and increases in extreme climate events [6].
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