Extreme flood events as a neglected natural hazard for marginalized Roma communities on the periphery and outside the municipalities of Slovakia

Marginalized Roma communities (MRC) located in flood prone areas represent a very current research challenge. With the incentive to reduce their flood exposure, this article sets out the following objectives: I) creation of a geodatabase of Slovak MRCs; ii) morphometric assessment of MRCs iii) flood hazard index calculation for individual MRCs iv) flood management recommendation for the most threatened MRCs. The presented study is based on an analysis of remote sensing and hydrological data, digital terrain model and Atlas of Roma communities (ARC). We used elevation percentile and elevation amplitude in terms of topographic analysis and landform classification. The distance of the MRC from the nearest watercourse, the occurrence of floods in the municipality and the barriers between the MRC and the nearest watercourse were used to estimate the flood hazard index. An analysis was carried out on a spatial geodatabase of 576 MRCs. We identified Roma communities on different landforms with 60.13% of them were in the first quartile of the elevation percentile. Among the regions with the highest number of most exposed MRCs, we listed the Topľa, Hornád 1, Torysa and Ondava 1 river basins sorted descending by the amount of MRCs with very high flood hazard.