Impact of Land Use Patterns on Flood Risk in the Chang-Zhu-Tan Urban Agglomeration, China

Flood risk assessment is an effective tool for disaster prevention and mitigation. As land use is a key factor influencing flood disasters, studying the impact of different land use patterns on flood risk is crucial. This study evaluates flood risk in the Chang-Zhu-Tan (CZT) urban agglomeration by selecting 17 socioeconomic and natural environmental factors within a risk assessment framework encompassing hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and resilience. Additionally, the Patch-Generating Land Use Simulation (PLUS) and multilayer perceptron (MLP)/Bayesian network (BN) models were coupled to predict flood risks under three future land use scenarios: natural development, urban construction, and ecological protection. This integrated modeling framework combines MLP’s high-precision nonlinear fitting with BN’s probabilistic inference, effectively mitigating prediction uncertainty in traditional single-model approaches while preserving predictive accuracy and enhancing causal interpretability. The results indicate that high-risk flood zones are predominantly concentrated along the Xiang River, while medium-high- and medium-risk areas are mainly distributed on the periphery of high-risk zones, exhibiting a gradient decline. Low-risk areas are scattered in mountainous regions far from socioeconomic activities. Simulating future land use using the PLUS model with a Kappa coefficient of 0.78 and an overall accuracy of 0.87. Under all future scenarios, cropland decreases while construction land increases. Forestland decreases in all scenarios except for ecological protection, where it expands. In future risk predictions, the MLP model achieved a high accuracy of 97.83%, while the BN model reached 87.14%. Both models consistently indicated that the flood risk was minimized under the ecological protection scenario and maximized under the urban construction scenario. Therefore, adopting ecological protection measures can effectively mitigate flood risks, offering valuable guidance for future disaster prevention and mitigation strategies. © 2025 by the authors.

Publisher: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)