Mapping and visualisation of urbanised area inundation vulnerability: a case-study from the Yarra River delta in the City of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia — YRD

Mapping and visualisation of urbanised area inundation vulnerability: a case-study from the Yarra River delta in the City of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (936)

Yvonne Lynch 1 , Peter Wheeler 2 , Joshphar Kunapo 2 , Matthew Coller 3
  1. City of Melbourne Council, Melbourne, Australia
  2. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
  3. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
The inundation of low-lying urbanised areas that have been constructed within coastal river delta landforms is an ever-present threat the world over. Such vulnerability often increases with on-going catchment change, and is expected to increase in the future due to predicted climate change scenarios. In these dynamic areas, the combination of high resolution spatial models of catchment and coastal areas, spatial data integration and multimedia visualisation techniques can allow for the early identification of a range of coastal zone management issues and potential problems. In this paper, we report the results of one such case study from the City of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, where highly urbanised area now extends over the Yarra River delta, situated at the head of Port Phillip Bay. This delta has been progressively developed since European settlement in the mid-1800s. Spatial modelling of this delta area has allowed high resolution indundation extent derivation, and spatial data integration and visualisation has allowed a range of inundation scenarios to be explored and understood by decision makers. The results from this research can be applied to support future Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) inundation scenario identification, awareness, and consensus-building activities amongst the sectoral stakeholder groups that will be tasked with identification of mitigation and/or adaptation strategies, which will inevitably need to be deployed at this location due to the predicted and combined effects catchment and coastal climate change.
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