The Journal of Flood Risk Management is pleased to announce that 'Resilience of art cities to flood risk: a quantitative model based on depth-idleness correlation' has been selected as the winning paper in Volume 15 of the outstanding paper award supported by CIWEM and Wiley.

The judging process for the award considered papers published in all issues of volume 15. In choosing a winner the journal editors considered downloads and citations which indicate our readers’ interest, quality of presentation as well as contribution to flood risk management science and practice.

The authors of the winning paper present a new and innovative approach to incorporate explicitly, a category of indirect damages in flood risk and resilience analyses.

In many regions, cultural heritage, particularly that associated with buildings, is threatened by floods; however, the understanding of exposure and vulnerability of cultural assets is challenging and consequently risk and resilience assessments are rarely produced.

Cultural heritage is crucial for post-disaster resilience, especially when the local economy is based on tourism. The authors of the winning paper propose a new vulnerability function based on the relationship between flood depth and length of closure of a cultural asset from post-event reports.

A resilience model which describes the recovery dynamics and estimates the indirect impacts in terms of loss of visitors to the particular heritage site for different probabilistic scenarios is explored.

The authors, Chiara Arrighi, Andrea Carraresi, and Fabio Castelli, apply this model to the art city of Florence (Italy), a UNESCO site visited by approximately 10 million people a year. They show that a moderate flood requires a recovery time of 351 days causing a loss of 10.5 million visitors; and that resilience can be increased by accelerating the reopening of the heritage sites.

Three highly commended papers were also chosen by the judges;

1. Assessing lithological uncertainty in dikes: simulating construction history and its implications for flood safety assessment

Authors: Teun van Woerkom, Rens van Beek, Hans Middelkoop, and Marc F. P. Bierkens

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfr3.12848

2. The benefits of coastal adaptation through conservation of foreshore vegetation

Authors: Timothy Tiggeloven, Hans de Moel, Vincent T. M. van Zelst, Bregje K. van Wesenbeeck, Hessel C. Winsemius, Dirk Eilander, and Philip J. Ward

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfr3.1...

3. Post-event flood mapping for road networks using taxi GPS data

Authors: Xiangfu Kong, Jiawen Yang, Jiandong Qiu, Qin Zhang, Xunlai Chen, Mingjie Wang, and Shan Jiang

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfr3.1...

Excellent potential to transfer innovations into policy or practice

Dr Paul Samuels, editor in chief of the journal, said “These papers all describe methods that offer excellent potential for transfer of the innovations described into policy or practice, a key aim of the journal. The winning and highly commended papers can all be used as examples for other authors; they all cover important aspects of flood risk management, they are well structured and written, with appropriate summaries and well-argued conclusions.”

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners for their exceptional contributions. Thanks go to our voluntary editorial panel for their time and expertise in judging the award. All articles published by the Journal of Flood Risk Management are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share.

To find out more about the journal visit - . https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1753318x