Flood Resilience learning guides
These learning guides were created during the ARTIFACT Summer School 2026 in Delft. Over four afternoons in July 2026, hosted at IHE Delft and TU Delft, participants took part in the FLORES event, a team competition held after the main summer school sessions each day and dedicated to creating flood resilience learning guides.
Working in small interdisciplinary teams, participants set out to design and build their own interactive tutorial on a topic of their choosing within the broad field of flood resilience.
Each guide was conceived as a focused module for future learners – a way to explain a single concept, method, model, or case study clearly and memorably. Below, you will find several learning guides regarding:
🌿Green Roofs — a Nature-Based Solution for Urban Flood Resilience
Can a rooftop garden really hold back a storm? This hands-on guide lets you find out. Using a simple rainfall-runoff model with interactive sliders, you send synthetic downpours onto a conventional roof and a green roof side by side, then adjust the roof’s storage capacity, drainage rate and starting wetness and watch the runoff peak shrink and arrive later. Along the way you build an intuition for why green roofs slow and reduce stormwater, and where their limits lie.
Created by: Dimitra Andjelkovic, Manas Ghising and Kyrill Schwede
🗺️Flood Risk Mapping — from Open Data to an Interactive Risk Map
Which hospitals, schools and roads would sit in the path of an extreme flood? In this guide you build a flood risk map from scratch using only free, open data and Python. It combines a 500-year flood hazard layer (JRC / Copernicus) with buildings, roads and land use pulled live from OpenStreetMaps, scores what’s most vulnerable, and multiplies the two to reveal where risk concentrates. You produce both static maps and a zoomable web map of central Paris – then rerun the whole workflow for any city you like by changing a single line.
Created by: Ines Mastouri, Jasmina Moskovljevic, Stefan Stevanovic and Min-Feng Lee
🌊Streamflow Forecasting — from Rainfall to River Discharge (host example)
How does rain turn into a river and can we forecast the flood before it arrives? Prepared by the summer school hosts as a worked example of what a complete FLORES tutorial looks like, this guide starts with the hydrology (the water balance, the three pathways water takes to the channel, and the shape of a hydrograph) and then turns that theory into a working forecast. You fetch historical weather and river-discharge data for any point on Earth from free public APIs, train a machine-learning model to predict daily streamflow, test it on a year it has never seen.
Because these guides run in Google Colab, you can open and explore each one directly in your browser – no installation needed, just a Google account. We hope they prove useful as open educational resources, and that they make a small but lasting contribution to the flood resilience education community well beyond the summer school itself. Many thanks to the participants who created the learning guides.
