Floodplain Reconnection Potential for Natural Flood Management

Floodplain reconnection potential data identifies areas in England where reconnecting watercourses to their natural floodplains may be feasible. The dataset was produced by the Environment Agency's Working with Natural Processes research project (SC150005). It is based on Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea probability maps.

Use Cases

• Identify areas of low flood probability near watercourses for potential floodplain reconnection projects.
• Screen candidate locations by excluding areas containing residential property or key services.
• Analyze spatial relationships between flood probability zones and watercourse proximity for flood wave mitigation planning.
• Prioritize site investigations for natural flood management by combining reconnection potential with woodland planting datasets.

Strengths

• Dataset is part of a structured toolbox including seven related mapped datasets for natural flood management.
• Based on authoritative national flood risk probability maps (Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea).
• Explicitly filters out areas containing residential property or key services to focus on viable locations.

Limitations

• Data may not reflect recent buildings, land use changes, or new flood defences, introducing potential staleness.
• Land ownership and detailed changes to flood risk from reconnection are not considered, requiring further modeling.
• The specific spatial coverage (e.g., region count) and resolution of the geospatial data are not provided.

Provenance

Source

Environment Agency, UK Government.

Collection Method

Derived from Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea probability maps via spatial analysis for the WWNP research project.

Time Range

Project publication circa 2015; base flood risk maps likely cover historical data up to that period.

Freshness

Last updated record indicates 2026-04-07, but the underlying project and base maps are from 2015.

Geography

England.