Where Do Humans Build Levees? A Case Study on the Contiguous United States

Understanding where and why human build levees offers several values: From a hydrological perspective, integration of levees to global flood models has been shown to improve their accuracy. From an Economic intelligence perspective, levee locations provide precious insights into past and future urban developments. However, very little data exists on the location of levees at a global scale, which hinders our ability to reach a global understanding of this question. One rare exception is the National Levee Database (NLD) dataset provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). In this study, we hypothesize that levees are built at locations where human activity and flood risk coexist, and develop predictive models that output the probability of levee existence at the hydrological catchment level. Quantitative analysis of these models using the NLD dataset allows to validate our hypothesis, with several important nuances, which we discuss at length.