Coastal flood risks and seasonal tourism

Since coastal tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of tourism industry, coastal areas have become increasingly vulnerable in case of flooding. Yet, coastal tourism is a seasonal phenomenon, with variations according to climate, holiday seasons and seasonal traditions. Despite its relevance in environmental issues, the effects of seasonal tourism have only scarcely been studied in coastal flood risk management. In this study, GIS and detailed tourist census data are used to analyze the temporal effects of seasonal tourism on flood risks at the Belgian coast. Different time settings are considered as well as tourist behaviour with respect to storm situations. The results of this study give new insights in the effects of seasonal tourism on coastal flood risks which may be useful in the context of early warning systems

Flood risk management in Flanders: past developments and future challenges

This paper presents the state of the art of flood risk management in Flanders, a low-lying region in the northern part of Belgium which is vulnerable to flooding. Possible flood hazard sources are not only the many rivers which pass through the Flemish inland, but also the North Sea, which is sensitive to the predicted sea level rise and which can affect large parts of the Flemish coastal area. Due to the expected increase in flood risks in the 21st century, the Flemish government has changed its flood management strategy from a flood control approach to a risk-based approach. Instead of focusing on protection against a certain water level, the objective now is to assure protection against the consequences of a flood, while considering its probability. In the first part, attention is given to the reasoning and functioning of the risk-based approach. Recent improvements to the approach are discussed, as well as the GIS-implementation of the entire model. The functioning of the approach is subsequently demonstrated in two case studies. The second part of the paper discusses future challenges for the flood risk management in Flanders. The driving force behind these challenges is the European Directive on the assessment and management of flood risks, which entered into force in 2007. The Flemish implementation of the directive is discussed and situated in the European landscape. Finally, attention is given to the communication of flood risks to the general public, since the "availability" of flood risk management plans is among the requirements of the EU Floods Directive

The informed society: an analysis of the public's information-seeking behavior regarding coastal flood risks

Recent flood risk management puts an increasing emphasis on the public's risk perception and its preferences. It is now widely recognized that a better knowledge of the public's awareness and concern about risks is of vital importance to outline effective risk communication strategies. Models such as Risk Information Seeking and Processing address this evolution by considering the public's needs and its information-seeking behavior with regard to risk information. This study builds upon earlier information-seeking models and focuses on the empirical relationships between information-seeking behavior and the constructs of risk perception, perceived hazard knowledge, response efficacy, and information need in the context of coastal flood risks. Specific focus is given to the mediating role of information need in the model and to the differences in information-seeking behavior between permanent and temporary residents. By means of a structured on-line questionnaire, a cross-sectional survey was carried out in the city of Ostend, one of the most vulnerable places to coastal flooding on the Belgian coast. Three hundred thirteen respondents participated in the survey. Path analysis reveals that information need does not act as a mediator in contrast to risk perception and perceived knowledge. In addition, it is shown that risk perception and perceived hazard knowledge are higher for permanent than temporary residents, leading to increased information-seeking behavior among the former group. Implications for risk communication are discussed

Supporting Streams of Changes during Branch Integration

International audienceWhen developing large applications, integrators face the problem of integrating changes between branches or forks. While version control systems provide support for merging changes, this support is mostly text-based, and does not take the program entities into account. Furthermore, there exists no support for assessing which other changes a particular change depends on have to be integrated. Consequently, integrators are left to perform a manual and tedious comparison of the changes within the sequence of their branch and to successfully integrate them. In this paper, we present an approach that analyzes changes within a sequence of changes (stream of changes): such analysis identifies and characterizes dependencies between the changes. The approach identifies changes as autonomous, only used by others, only using other changes, or both. Such a characterization aims at easing the integrator's work. In addition, the approach supports important queries that an integrator otherwise has to perform manually. We applied the approach to a stream of changes representing 5 years of development work on an open- source project and report our experiences

Perception and communication of flood risks: a systematic review of empirical research

Flood hazards are the most common and destructive of all natural disasters. For decades, experts have been examining how flood losses can be mitigated. Just as in other risk domains, the study of risk perception and risk communication has gained increasing interest in flood risk management. Because of this research growth, a review of the state of the art in this domain is believed necessary. The review comprises 57 empirically based peer-reviewed articles on flood risk perception and communication from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The characteristics of these articles are listed in a comprehensive table, presenting research design, research variables, and key findings. From this review, it follows that the majority of studies are of exploratory nature and have not applied any of the theoretical frameworks that are available in social science research. Consequently, a methodological standardization in measuring and analyzing people's flood risk perceptions and their adaptive behaviors is hardly present. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in comparing results among studies. It is also shown that theoretical and empirical studies on flood risk communication are nearly nonexistent. The article concludes with a summary on methodological issues in the fields of flood-risk perception and flood-risk communication and proposes an agenda for future research

Supporting Incremental Change in Large System Models

International audienceWhen reengineering large systems, software developers would like to assess and compare the impact of multiple change scenarios without actually performing these changes. A change can be ef- fected by applying a tool to the source code, or by a manual refac- toring. In addition, tools run over a model are costly to redevelop. It raises an interesting challenge for tools implementors: how to support modification of large source code models to enable com- parison of multiple versions. One naive approach is to copy the entire model after each modification. However, such an approach is too expensive in memory and execution time. In this paper we ex- plore different implementations that source code metamodels sup- port multiple versions of a system. We propose a solution based on dynamic binding of entities between multiple versions, providing good access performance while minimizing memory consumption

AspectMaps: Extending Moose to visualize AOP software

International audienceWhen using aspect-oriented programming the application implicitly invokes the functionality contained in the aspects. Consequently program comprehension of such a software is more intricate. To alleviate this difficulty we developed the AspectMaps visualization and tool. AspectMaps extends the Moose program comprehension and reverse engineering platform with support for aspects, and is implemented using facilities provided by Moose. In this paper we present the AspectMaps tool, and show how it can be used by performing an exploration of a fairly large aspect-oriented application. We then show how we extended the FAMIX meta-model family that underpins Moose to also provide support for aspects. This extension is called ASPIX, and thanks to this enhancement Moose can now also treat aspect-oriented software. Finally, we report on our experiences using some of the tools in Moose; Mondrian to implement the visualization, and Glamour to build the user interface. We discuss how we were able to implement a sizable visualization tool using them and how we were able to deal with some of their limitations. Note: This paper uses colors extensively. Please use a color version to better understand the ideas presented here