Abstract
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OSM community, seeking to understand the spatial and temporal footprint of these large-scale mapping efforts. The spatio-temporal statistical analysis of OSM’s full history since 2008 showed that humanitarian mapping efforts added 60.5 million buildings and 4.5 million roads to the map. Overall, mapping in OSM was strongly biased towards regions with very high Human Development Index. However, humanitarian mapping efforts had a different footprint, predominantly focused on regions with medium and low human development. Despite these efforts, regions with low and medium human development only accounted for 28% of the buildings and 16% of the roads mapped in OSM although they were home to 46% of the global population. Our results highlight the formidable impact of humanitarian mapping efforts such as post-disaster mapping campaigns to improve the spatial coverage of existing open geographic data and maps, but they also reveal the need to address the remaining stark data inequalities, which vary significantly across countries. We conclude with three recommendations directed at the humanitarian mapping community: (1) Improve methods to monitor mapping activity and identify where mapping is needed. (2) Rethink the design of projects which include humanitarian data generation to avoid non-sustainable outcomes. (3) Remove structural barriers to empower local communities and develop capacity.
Highlights
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals
Drawing lessons from what has been called the “immeasurability” of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs)[1], much attention has been given towards indicators and frameworks to monitor the United Nation (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[2]
Our results provide insight on the scale and spatial footprint of general mapping activity in OSM, which constitutes the baseline to evaluate humanitarian mapping efforts
Summary
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. While initially the term ’disaster mapping’ has been introduced to describe the “ability for volunteers to assist in disaster response situations via mapping and other spatial analysis”[12], since 2010 the broader term ’humanitarian mapping’ has evolved It refers to collaborative mapping in OSM (and other platforms such as MapSwipe or Ushahidi) for both humanitarian relief responses and humanitarian purposes in g eneral[13,14,15]. It shows the immediate impact that post-disaster community “activations” have had on the contributions to OSM Besides these punctual events, there are several additional factors with more long-term effects such as the introduction of new tools, the availability of open satellite imagery for mapping in OSM and the number of organizations involved. The 2015 Nepal earthquake has been identified as a turning point in the adoption of OSM by a Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:3037 |
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