Distributed hydrodynamic modelling for assessing flood impacts on crops: Assessing flood-resilient crop management in a coastal basin of central Italy

Nuisance flooding phenomena do not only affect urban areas, but also agriculture, determining catastrophic damages to crops. The impact of floods on crops has been an underrated topic in scientific literature that focuses more on urban areas, probably because they tend to have higher densities of population, infrastructure, industries, and real estate properties, which translates into more substantial human and economic losses during floods. In this work, we proposed a quantitative physically based method for crop damage assessment based on distributed hydrodynamic modelling of flood events. It exploited a combined high-resolution 1D-2D hydraulic model and crop resistance interlinked dynamics. The method allows to quantify, with unprecedented high resolution, the spatially distributed probability of crop losses for different crop types for different flood recurrence intervals. The methodology is applied in a relevant case study in central Italy, the Marta River basin, that experienced ...