The impact of embankment construction on floodplain land use in the context of its influence on the environment: a case study of selected cities in Poland

The main aim of this research was to analyse the impact of embankment construction on floodplain land use through a land use comparison of embanked and unembanked floodplains. Another purpose of was to assess the influence of studied floodplain land use on the environment. The analysis was conducted on the example of two cities along the Odra River in Poland: Oława and Brzeg, which significantly vary from each other in the level of river levee. The former one is embanked while the latter is not. The study has shown that in the cities studied there is a more beneficial method of floodplain spatial management in the embanked areas, both from the protection and functioning of the environment and for potential environmental contamination in the case of the perspective of flooding (in fact, these areas are less invested than the examined embanked areas), as well as the embankment being an important anthropogenic element that changes river valley land use. It is largely determined through hydrology (the change of water and soil conditions due to the creation of an embankment), but also by legal regulations in the range of spatial planning and economics in the floodplain areas.