Prof. Dr. Philippe De Maeyer was invited to visit and make exchanges with Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping on December16, 2019, Beijing, China.


      On December 16, 2019, at the invitation of Chair of CEW&CM Liu Jiping, Prof. Philippe De Maeyer from the University of Ghent, Belgium, came to Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping to give a report entitled "A Vector Method for Flood Risk Modeling". Prof. Philippe De Maeyer is a full-time professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium. In 2019, he was elected as the Vice President of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) and the liaison of CEW&CM.

      Prof. Philippe De Maeyer's report states that flood risk must be understood as the combination of the probability that a flood occurs and the extent of its consequences. Flood risks can be determined for different categories of consequences. The most common categories are the economic consequences and the human loss, but there are also other categories that must be considered, such as social, ecological and cultural risk.

      Ghent University developed different methods for the calculation of flood risk. A first one, LATIS, is a raster based method and it is used today by different governmental authorities in Belgium. As other raster models, the main downfall of such an impact assessment tool is that raster approach cannot effectively handle multiple metadata of vital infrastructures, crucial buildings, and vulnerable land use (among other challenges).

      For this reason, researchers at Ghent University developed a new method, FLIAT® (FLood Impact Assessment Tool). It uses a vector approach, linked to a relational database using open source program languages, which can perform parallel computation, allowing the immediately computing of the impact of floods on a community. It can manage multiple detailed datasets, whereby there is no loss of geometrical information. Beside different categories of risk calculation, the model allows also the calculation of priority maps using multi-criteria analysis.