Archeological Areas & Potential Flood Impact
Quick Identification for Further Study
SAIT - GEOS 419 - FINAL PROJECT
The Question.
Can we quickly identify areas within our AOI that are of high archeological importance and at possible risk for flooding?
We used publicly availably data to being the process.
What is a Significant Archeological Area?
Historic Resource Value (HRV) and historic resource category Each land parcel in the Listing has been assigned a Historic Resource Value (HRV) of 1, 3, 4 and/or 5. The highest level of protection (HRV 1) is afforded to lands that have been designated under the HRA as Provincial Historic Resources.
HRVs are defined as follows:
HRV 1: contains a World Heritage site or a site designated under the HRA as a Provincial Historic Resource
HRV 2: deactivated (formerly used to designate a Registered Historic Resource2 )
HRV 3: contains a significant historic resource that will likely require avoidance
HRV 4: contains a historic resource that may require avoidance
HRV 5: high potential to contain a historic resource
(Alberta 2021)
What Areas Might Flood?
Although there are flood mapping datasets available, they are not extensive.
We examined slope mapping based on a 100m DEM. This looked like a possible way to delineate flood plains.
This looked like a promising method, but converting the slope rasters to vector data for analysis proved to be too time consuming.
Flood Cross Sections
The Alberta flood mapping, although not extensive enough did provide us with cross section information on the flooding that was studied.
The mean value of these cross sections were used to generate buffers around rivers to delineate potential flood areas.
Significant Areas + Buffers
With a basic estimation of flood impact and a layer of where we have potentially important archeological sites, we were able to overlay these two layers to give us a high level overview.
At a much larger scale we can see how the flood estimations impacted the archeological area polygons in more detail.
This allowed us to create a total affected area percentage.
Verification
One of our last steps was to overlay our slope, affected area and flood estimation buffers onto a single map.
This gave us a simple way to complete a visual inspection and show that our affected areas had some level of merit.
There was a fairly good correlation between possible flood locations when we used this method.
It was clear that the model most likely has giving us an overestimation of affected area, but within the scope of what we were trying to accomplish.
Affected Area
The area along the Bow river between Calgary and Cochrane was an area we identified with a large number of archeological areas of significance that might be impacted by flooding events.
We believe if future studies are to be launched on potential flood impact, that these areas should be looked at more closely.
