Journal of Global Ecology and Environment

Flood is an important natural disaster type that needs to be studied better to reduce its impact on human life.The study examined the correlations between flood vulnerability levels and morphometric parameters in the lower Orashi River, Niger Delta Region, Nigeria To achieve this, the river course was divided into 30 segments whereby the information for morphometric parameters such as width, depth, velocity, cross sectional area and discharge are generated using standard methods. The flood vulnerability data were obtained using UNION method from ArcGIS platform and the point segment was overlaid on the flood vulnerability to actually observed actual flood vulnerability levels of each segment. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for the data analysis. Findings showed that flood vulnerability is positively correlated with width of the river (R²=0.1994); cross sectional area (R² = 0.1635) and discharge (R²=0.1762) while it was negative with the elevation (R²=0.0002); depth (R²=0.0387) and velocity (R²=0.0323). The study concluded that width of river, cross sectional area and discharge are the dominating river morphometric parameters influencing the flood vulnerability in the Lower Orashi River. It is thus recommended that the Lower Orashi River can be dredged so that the depth can be increased to reduce the levels of flood vulnerability.