BREE Graduate Research Assistant Jesse Gourevitch and Ecological Systems Team Member Beverley Wemple, PhD are among the authors on a new paper, "Improving flood hazard datasets using a low-complexity, probabilistic floodplain mapping approach." The article, whose authors also include Rebecca Diehl, PhD of the UVM Department of Geography and Stephanie Drago of the UVM Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, represents the first effort in Vermont to map the distribution of natural capital that provides important flood mitigation and water quality benefits. In doing so, it captures the range of variability in flooding in the Lake Champlain Basin.

The work presented in the article represents a collaboration of effort, building off of the Vermont EPSCoR RACC and BREE projects. Additional funding from The Nature Conservator and the UVM Gund Institute for the Environment allowed the recruitment of Drago as a graduate student and helped to form partnerships to take on new and challenging problems.

The products of this research will form one of the backbones of Vermont's Functioning Floodplains Initiative (FFI), which will have important policy and economic impacts throughout the state. That initiative is expected to deliver many more products as a result of this research in the coming months.

The article is available online at the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One. To view the article, visit https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248683.