Technical Note: ‎Constraints to residential land use development arising from flood ‎and runoff coefficient in a land use planning framework, case study: ‎Ziarat Watershed, Golestan Province

Identification the source areas of surface runoff and flood prone zones and their impact on residential expansion are important. The aim of the present study is to consider the impact of potential runoff coefficient and flood inundation for different recurrence intervals in analyzing residential expansion for the current land use pattern as well as suitable land use allocation based on the systemic land use planning of Iran in the Ziarat watershed in Golestan Province. The pre-processed Landsat TM image 2010 was used to determine the land use map of the study area and then a suitability analysis is then carried out to establish the potential residential development area in the framework of Iranian systemic land use planning model. The raster layers of slope, soil type, and land use were prepared and the potential runoff coefficient values were determined using the attributes. Floodplain zonation maps were delineated by integrating HEC-RAS and ArcGIS in different return periods. The results indicate that the residential area covers 3.4% of the study area and 9% of the study area was assigned as 1 and 2 suitability classes, according to land use planning model. On the basis of the potential runoff coefficient map, the average runoff coefficient was 0.51%. Based on the combined flood zone maps and runoff coefficient, the flood prone areas will increase for 25, 50, 100, and 200 year floods for both current and determined residential land uses. The areas of flood-secure regions in current residential land use were 318.47, 317.46, 316.44, and 316.44 ha for different design floods respectively. Increasing the return period from 20-50 to 100-200 years lead to an increase of flood zone extent (3.5 ha).