Modern-day flood management has evolved into a variety of flood management alternatives. The selection of appropriate flood measures is crucial under a variety of flood management practices, approaches, and assessment criteria. Many leading countries appraise the significance of risk-based flood management, but the fixed return period is still the de facto standard of flood management practices. Several measures, approaches, and design criteria have been developed over time. Understanding their role, significance, and correlation toward risk-based flood management is crucial for integrating them into a plan for a floodplain. The direct impacts of a flood are caused by direct contact with the flood, while indirect impacts occur as a result of the interruptions and disruptions of the socio-economical aspects. To proceed with a risk-based flood management approach, the fundamental requirement is to understand the risk dynamics of a floodplain and to identify the principal parameter that should primarily be addressed so as to reduce the risk. Risk is a potential loss that may arise from a hazard. On the one hand, exposure and susceptibility of the vulnerable system, and on the other, the intensity and probability of the hazard, are the parameters that can be used to quantitatively determine risk. The selection of suitable measures for a flood management scheme requires a firm apprehension of the risk mechanism. Under socio-economic and environmental constraints, several measures can be employed at the catchments, channels, and floodplains. The effectiveness of flood measures depends on the floodplain characteristics and supporting measures.

Floods are natural disasters with significant economic and infrastructural impacts. Assessing flood susceptibility in mountainous urban regions is particularly challenging due to the complicated interaction in which urban structures and mountainous terrain affect flood behavior. This study employs two ensemble machine learning algorithms, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Random Forest (RF), to develop flood susceptibility maps for the Hunza-Nagar region, which has been experiencing frequent flooding for the past three decades. An unsteady flow simulation is carried out in HEC-RAS utilizing a 100-year return period flood hydrograph as an input boundary condition, the output of which provided the spatial inundation extents necessary for developing the flood inventory. Ten explanatory factors, including climatic, geological, and geomorphological features namely elevation, slope, curvature, topographic wetness index (TWI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), land use land cover (LULC), rainfall, lithology, distance to roads and distance to rivers are considered for the flood susceptibility mapping. For developing flood inventory, random sampling technique is adopted to create a spatial repository of flood and non-flood points, incorporating the ten geo-environmental flood conditioning factors. The models’ accuracy is assessed using the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristics (ROC). The prediction rate AUC values are 0.912 for RF and 0.893 for XGBoost, with RF also demonstrating superior performance in accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and kappa evaluation metrics. Consequently, the RF model is selected to represent the flood susceptibility map for the study area. The resulting flood susceptibility maps will assist national disaster management and infrastructure development authorities in identifying high flood susceptible zones and carrying out early mitigation actions for future floods.

Previous experimental research on utilizing pier modifications as countermeasures against local scour has focused primarily on circular pier. It is of utmost importance to further investigate the most suitable pier shape for pier modification countermeasure separately and in combination. This experimental study aims to reduce the stagnation of the flow and vortex formation in front of the bridge pier by providing a collar, a hooked collar, a cable, and openings separately and in combination around a suitable pier shape. Therefore, six different pier shapes were utilized to find out the influence of pier shape on local scouring for a length–width ratio smaller than or equal to 3. A plain octagonal shape was shown as having more satisfactory results in reducing scour compared to other pier shapes. Furthermore, the efficiency of pier modification was then evaluated by testing different combinations of collar, hooked collar, cable, and openings within the octagonal bridge pier, which was compared to an unprotected octagonal pier without any modification. The results show that by applying such modifications, the scour depth reduced significantly. The best combination was found to be a hooked collar with cable and openings around an octagonal pier. It was revealed that the best combination reduced almost 53% of scour depth, as compared to an unprotected octagonal pier.

Groundwater supplies approximately half of the total global domestic water demand. It also complements the seasonal and annual variabilities of surface water. Monitoring of groundwater fluctuations is mandatory to envisage the composition of terrestrial water storage. This research provides an overview of traditional techniques and detailed discussion on the modern tools and methods to monitor groundwater fluctuations along with advanced applications. The groundwater monitoring can broadly be classified into three groups. The first one is characterized by the point measurement to measure the groundwater levels using classical instruments and electronic and physical investigation techniques. The second category involves the extensive use of satellite data to ensure robust and cost-effective real-time monitoring to assess the groundwater storage variations. Many satellite data are in use to find groundwater indirectly. However, GRACE satellite data supported with other satellite products, computational tools, GIS techniques, and hydro-climate models have proven the most effective for groundwater resources management. The third category is groundwater numerical modeling, which is a very useful tool to evaluate and project groundwater resources in future. Groundwater numerical modeling also depends upon the point-based groundwater monitoring, so more research to improve point-based detection methods using latest technologies is required, as these still play the baseline role. GRACE and numerical groundwater modeling are suggested to be used conjunctively to assess the groundwater resources more efficiently.

The construction industry is considered a driver of economic growth, especially in developing countries. However, the successful completion of construction projects is a major challenge, due to the lack of competencies. The current study explores the effects of communication management practices, clarity in the scope of the construction project, and organizational culture to enhance project success. A project manager is essential in running a project smoothly and according to the schedule. Keeping in view the predominant role of the project manager, this study aims to find the moderating impact of manager competencies to improve the construction project routine and generate successful projects. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the data and determine how these variables influence construction project progress. The current research results show an excellent association between a construction project’s success and the discussed independent variables. Additionally, it was found that a competent project manager can play a better role in preventing the uncomfortable influences of independent variables on the dependent variable. The obtained outcomes highlight the importance of adequately handling organizational culture, communication management, and clarity to achieve project success. These outcomes are helpful for the professionals working in the construction sector to raise the project success rate and enhance their construction management capabilities.