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INTRODUCTION
Floods cause considerable economic loss and serious damage to towns and farms and are one of the most common natural disasters recorded in the world, especially with their increased frequencies as an estimated impact of global warming (Christensen & Christensen 2003; Frei et al. 2006; Zhang & Li 2007; Nakayama & Watanabe 2008; Garcia-Castellanos et al. 2009; Nie et al. 2012; Gül 2013). It is evident from the literature that the frequency and number of hydro-meteorological hazards (i.e., floods) are on the rise compared with geophysically induced disasters (Ramos & Reis 2002; Krausmann & Mushtaq 2008; Adikari & Yoshitani 2009). Over the last several decades, many countries have suffered from severe flooding, such as the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh, the Oder and the Vistula in Poland, the Elbe in Germany, the Mekong River in Vietnam, the Menam River in Thailand, the Indus in Pakistan, and the Yangtze River in China (Chowdhury 2003; Gupta & Sah 2008; Yu et al. 2009; Wang et al. 2010; Khan et al. 2011; Yi et al. 2012). The global cost of floods has reached a total of $470 billion since 1980 (Knight et al. 2011).
Similar to other countries, China is no exception to recurrent floods due to the strong influence of the East Asian monsoon (Liu & Liu 2002; Yu et al. 2009). Two-thirds of Chinese territory and over half of the total population are affected by a variety of flood events almost every year (Nakayama & Watanabe 2008; Wang et al. 2012); this is especially true in the Yangtze River basin, which is historically one of the most frequently flooded areas in China (Zhao 2000; Cai et al. 2001). Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is located in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and is one of the few lakes that remains naturally connected to the Yangtze River. During the past several decades, the Poyang Lake region has experienced as many as 17 major flood events, six of which can be categorized as severe floods (i.e., 1954, 1983, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999) (Li et al. 2015a). Moreover, it has recently been shown that the frequency and severity of the floods in Poyang Lake have increased since 1990 (Guo et al....