Floodplain identification in the context of flood exposure of marginalized Roma communities

Identifikácia riečnej nivy v kontexte povodní, ktorým sú vystavené marginalizované rómske komunity

Abstract

The article deals with the spatial identification of river floodplains in order to locate marginalized Roma communities exposed to fluvial floods. It works mainly with data from the Atlas of Roma Communities published in 2019, which for a sample of 231 out of a total of 696 segregated communities is supplemented by a more accurate spatial representation within the respective municipality. The main methodological tool was the height above the nearest drainage parameter, which was derived from DMR3.5 data and, at the local level in the locality surrounding the settlement of Pribylina (Northern Slovakia), from the more accurate DMR5.0. We have shown that most of the mapped communities lie less than 100 m in proximity to the watercourse, even more than a half of them are located closer than 30 m. On a floodplain within 4 m high from the adjacent watercourse, we identified 114 marginalized Roma communities. The distribution of the marginalized Roma communities present on the floodplain corresponds to the overall distribution of Roma communities in Slovakia, but the highest number of such communities situated on the floodplain is in the Prešov region.