A Data Mining Approach for Capacity Building of Stakeholders in Integrated Flood Management

New approaches to managing flood events are increasingly of more relevance due to recent widespread floods and the presumed changes in the climate. These approaches fall under the integrated flood management (IFM) banner and focus not only on flood prevention, but on flood resilience. This paper introduces an application (FLORETO) for IFM that utilizes the data mining approach, in a web based three tier system, devoted to the capacity building of stakeholders as a micro-scale resilience strategy of IFM. The intelligent models, which constitute the business logic in FLORETO, are used to match the input parameters or design criteria, describing properties prone to flooding, to technically justifiable flood mitigation measures. Datasets from the German city of Kellinghusen were collected and intelligent models were built. Satisfactory results have been obtained, which shows the promise of this data mining approach and opens the door for its application for IFM in other regions.