The goal of this study is mapping flood risks over Golestan province in Iran using one of the artificial intelligence methods called multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). In this sense, 14 flood conditioning factors were considered and the maps were made in ArcGIS. Additionally, two novel metaheuristic algorithms namely cat swarm optimization (CSO) and water cycle algorithm (WCA) were applied to optimized the MARS parameters. According to the results, the area under the curve provided by receiver operating characteristic curve illustrated the accuracy of 94.5% for the integrated MARS-WCA. As regards the MARS-WCA model, a total area of 44.74% was identified as highly susceptible for flooding. In addition, to determine the maximum influence of input variables on mapping flood risks, the sensitivity analysis was performed. By performing sensitivity analysis, altitude and slope with NDVI were the three important variables, respectively, for spatially flash flood prediction.