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Land and runoff management

land-and-runoff

The way that rural land is managed, both in terms of the vegetative cover and the underlying soil, can greatly influence the pathways and speed by which incident rainfall reaches watercourses. Good land and soil management practices can help to minimise the generation of surface runoff and reduce downstream flood risk. Land and soil management for NFM involves cultivating soils to promote a good macro-structure and good organic matter content, thereby increasing soil infiltration and reducing surface flow generation and associated sediment transport. Surface water flooding is usually associated with heavy rainfall falling on impermeable surfaces, dry (capped) soils, frozen soils, or on a saturated catchment, causing overland flow to occur. This rainfall induced overland flow is quickly transferred to channels across the surface of the landscape due to the limited potential for soil infiltration. There is a consequent rapid rise in channel levels and a flashy catchment response to the rainfall. This high energetic flow of water across the landscape can result in erosion to soil and the transport of sediments (and sediment associated pollutants). Runoff management measures target these flow pathways, disconnecting them thereby attenuating the flow.

Case Studies

News & Events

The Eddleston Water project, Tweed Forum and Scottish Government's long-running empirical study of the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management (NFM) has just been designated by UNESCO as...
A focus review paper on mitigating floods and attenuating surface runoff with temporary storage areas (TSAs) in headwaters has been published in the journal WIRES (Wiley Interdiciplinary...
A report has been produced by the Environment Agency that evaluates their Natural Flood Management programme. Between 2017 and 2021, £15 million of government funding was invested in 60...

Literature

What can be learnt from working with a community to identify what flood risk management measures are needed, are acceptable and which deliver the greatest multiple benefits?

Images

Videos

Embedded thumbnail for Eddleston Water, Tweed Catchment
Embedded thumbnail for Eddleston Water, Tweed Catchment