Paul Gräfe from the Surveying and Geoinformatics degree programme has been working on GIS-based analysis and Bayesian networks to assess flood risks in agriculture during heavy rainfall events. His Bachelor's thesis on this topic was honoured with the BDB prize and the results were published.
His results show that the theory of Bayesian networks (BN) in combination with GIS analyses is applicable to the problem.
By including the superordinate area of the Rems-Murr district, he was able to reproduce the flood risk from a heavy rainfall event such as that of 2 June 2024 in Rudersberg. The validation of his models shows that the optimised BN provides reliable flood risk assessments and realistically depicts the events of the heavy rainfall event in the Rems-Murr district. The validation based on 103 flooded parcels showed predominantly high flood probabilities with an average value of 77 % and a maximum of 87 %.
Results of the optimisation: Risk map of agricultural properties for the heavy rainfall event on 2 June 2024 in Rudersberg
The results of this work have been published in a scientific article and are available at the following link:
https://resiliencepress.org/index.php/disaster/article/view/2/2
The chairman of the BDB-Baden-Württemberg, Benjamin Sattes, praised the result and the excellent preparation of this Bachelor's thesis. He presented Mr Gräfe with the €500 prize in the presence of his supervisor Prof Angela Blanco-Vogt and the Dean of Studies for the Bachelor of Surveying and Geoinformatics, Prof Hardy Lehmkühler.
We congratulate him on the "BDB Sponsorship Award for Students 2025"