MORPHODYNAMICS OF THE DAMBOVITA FLOODPLAIN USING DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS
MORPHODYNAMICS OF THE DAMBOVITA FLOODPLAIN USING DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS

Summary/Abstract: Bucharest, the capital of Romania, is situated in the Romanian Plain and is being drained by Dambovita River. During the last 150 years the natural landscape has been intensely modified by its inhabitants.The most prominent change has been induced in the Dambovita floodplain, where the floodplain features have been completely changed. Besides all the human interventions on the natural landscape, we can still identify the remains of the natural floodplain features such as the slopes of the plain on its right hand side, the meadow, the overbank hillocks, like Negru-Voda Hill and Mithropoly Hill, some old gullies, like Garlita which flowed South from the actual Iuliu Maniu Boulevard. Other geomorphological features refer to the old meanders, such as the Tineretului and Carol I lakes. The present paper aims to identify the geomorphological features and to highlight the major geomorphological changes that Bucharest suffered over the last 150 years. The methodology of this paper consists in adiachronic analysis of historical maps (Szatmary map, The Bucharest Plan 1:5.000 from 1911) and of more recent maps (topographical map 1:25.000, ortophotoplans). We compared the historical DEM, from 1911 and the LiDAR DEM, from 2008. The major human intervention was the improvement of the Dambovita channel and the demolition and/or the construction of different buildings during the communist period. Besides the human induced geomorphological changes, there are also a series of natural geomorphological phenomena that are shaping the landscape of Bucharest. Among these, we can find soil creeping, subsidence and elevation mostly in the Dambovita floodplain.

• Details
• Contents