Understanding Anthropogenic Landforms Adjacent to Floodplains
- Project Members
- Alexandria Rodgers, Frances Davenport
- Study Areas
- Contiguous U.S.
Why is this important?
Anthropogenic landforms, such as agricultural berms and levees, impact our understanding of social risk and flooding behavior. These structures shape where and how people live along rivers, yet recent research shows a significant lack in documentation. The National Levee Database covers mainly federally involved levees, and many others, including locally built, privately maintained and older structures, have never been systematically mapped. Without knowing where all levees are, who they protect and how much river they confine, we can’t fully assess flood risk, equity in flood protection, or the downstream effects of leveed floodplains.
How are we answering this question?
This project builds on a nationwide dataset of candidate levees (Knox et al., 2022) and asks what those levees actually protect. For each candidate, we estimate the length of stream it likely guards and link it to the surrounding land: how much is developed or cultivated, what census tract it sits in, and how rural or urban that area is. We then compare protection patterns across communities using demographic data and the Social Vulnerability Index. The aim is a clearer, more defensible picture of who lives behind levees across the contiguous U.S.