Professor Pippa Chapman and Dr Sofia Biffi | Planting hedges to mitigate floods

Описание: Professor Pippa Chapman, School of Geography, University of Leeds and Dr Sofia Biffi, Aarhus University, Denmark, gave a 20-minute presentation on how planting hedges can help prevent floods and understand different soil types. Chaired by Professor Guy Ziv, School of Geography, University of Leeds.

Wooden features like trees and hedges can help control how water moves across the land by influencing rainwater flow and reducing surface runoff. For this reason, planting hedgerows is often suggested as a natural way to manage floods. However, there is very little real-world evidence on how hedgerows affect soil’s ability to absorb and drain water, especially across different types of soil. In this webinar, they shared results from a study that looked at how soil qualities changed under 32 hedgerows of different ages (less than 5 years, about 10 years old, and older) on two common types of soils: brown earths and gley soils.

Their findings indicated that planting hedges can help reduce flood risks, but the effect tends to be bigger and faster on soils that drain well compared to those that drain poorly. These insights will help improve future models for natural flood prevention.

Pippa staff profile: https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/geogr...
Sofia staff profile: https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/geogr...