## 6 Conclusions  
The present study, concerning the connection between land-use/land-cover changes between 1989 and 2019 and flash-flood potential evolution in the Zabala catchment holds great practical importance in the context of the multiplication of flash floods events that represent hydrological risk phenomena, especially affecting the sub-Carpathian zone of the basin.  
The applied methodology was based on the correlation between the values of TRDSDLUI, which highlighted the land-use/land-cover changes between 1989 and 2019, and RDFFPI values, which highlighted the changes within the flash-flood potential index. The values of TRDSDLUI were derived on 1 km\({}^{2}\) grid cell size with the help of remote sensing and GIS techniques, while for computing the RDFFPI values on the same grid cell size, the use of machine learning (MLP) had a crucial role. The high efficiency of the MLP algorithm, in the case of FFPI mapping, was demonstrated by the AUC values of the ROC curve, which were between 0.837 and 0.895.  
Having obtained the highly accurate results for both indicators of land-use/land-cover changes and flash-flood potential changes, the correlation between these two processes were assessed through the geographically weighted regression. The analysis tools provided by geostatistics were efficient as they were able: (1) to confirm the overall correlation between the two phenomena; and (2) to identify the local particularities of each analyzed spatial unit, which were highlighted by the spatial variability of the Pearson correlation coefficient.  
Given the results presented above, we can state that the changes that occurred in the land use/land cover were correlated to a high degree with the changes that occurred in the FFPI, especially in the eastern, southern, and southwestern part of the Zabala river catchment. Therefore, it can be assumed that, within the study area, the land-use/land-cover changes had a crucial role in the intensification of flash-flood events, which were more and more frequent within the study area.  
The main novelty of the present study is the fact that, to our best knowledge, it is the first study that addresses the problem of land-use/land-cover changes in relation to the changes within the flash-flood potential index at international level. Also, taking into account that, nowadays, the subject of the effects of land-use/land-cover changes regarding the intensification of floods and flash-floods is a very highly discussed issue in the literature, the present study can be a very solid benchmark for future studies and new research directions.  
The results of the present study can also be used in order to efficiently plan the use of territory from the flood risk management point of view.  
Conceptualization, R.C., Q.B.P., E.C.-R., B.T.P. and C.C.; data curation, R.C., E.C.-R., and C.C.; formal analysis, Q.B.P., H.H., N.T.T.L., and C.M.F.; methodology, R.C., Q.B.P., E.C.-R., C.C., and A.N.A.; software, M.V., S.M.P., and B.T.P.; supervision, B.T.P. and R.C.; validation, Q.B.P., B.T.P. and M.V.; visualization, R.C. and Q.B.P.; writing--original draft, R.C., B.T.P.; writing--review and editing, G.M., N.C., D.C.D., B.T.P. and M.C.P.; project administration, B.T.P. All the authors discussed the results and edited the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
The authors would like to appreciate the financial support received from Bold 2025 grant coded RJO-10436494 by Innovation & Research Management Center (iRMC), Universiti Tenaga Nacional (UNITEN), Malaysia. In addition, this work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-18-0185 and by the VEGA agency under the grant no. 1/0934/17.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.