Crisis Mapping Research Articles

Introducing ICBe: an event extraction dataset from narratives about international crises

Abstract How do international crises unfold? We conceptualize international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event iconography and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (synthetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, supplementary appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website crisisevents.org.

Attitude in a crisis: A new keystone concept in crisis communication leadership

Abstract‘When people's emotions are at stake, there is the constant need to be seen to engage and connect with them in their hours of need’. This study contributes to the literature on Integrated Crisis Mapping, a stakeholder‐centric crisis communication framework that attunes organisational leaders to the emotional responses and coping needs of their primary publics. Building on Weick's insight about the importance of an attitude of wisdom in making sense of a crisis, the study proposes crisis attitude as a keystone concept to help bridge the gap between theory and practice in crisis communication. The study illustrates the concept with an attitude of humility, explaining how it could be apposite to navigating the dynamics of a crisis and serve a sensegiving function that decreases stakeholders' negative emotions and fosters their trust in leadership.

VGI and Satellite Imagery Integration for Crisis Mapping of Flood Events

Timely mapping of flooded areas is critical to several emergency management tasks including response and recovery activities. In fact, flood crisis maps embed key information for an effective response to the natural disaster by delineating its spatial extent and impact. Crisis mapping is usually carried out by leveraging data provided by satellite or airborne optical and radar sensors. However, the processing of these kinds of data demands experienced visual interpretation in order to achieve reliable results. Furthermore, the availability of in situ observations is crucial for the production and validation of crisis maps. In this context, a frontier challenge consists in the use of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) as a complementary in situ data source. This paper proposes a procedure for flood mapping that integrates VGI and optical satellite imagery while requiring limited user intervention. The procedure relies on the classification of multispectral images by exploiting VGI for the semi-automatic selection of training samples. The workflow has been tested with photographs and videos shared on social media (Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube) during two flood events and classification consistency with reference products shows promising results (with Overall Accuracy ranging from 87% to 93%). Considering the limitations of social media-sourced photos, the use of QField is proposed as a dedicated application to collect metadata needed for the image classification. The research results show that the integration of high-quality VGI data and semi-automatic data processing can be beneficial for crisis map production and validation, supporting crisis management with up-to-date maps.

The role of citizens and geoinformation in providing alerts and crisis information to the public

Mankind has been facing constant threats and challenges from natural and civilisational disasters for centuries. The fundamental responsibility of states is to protect the lives, health, and property of their citizens. However, protection against natural and civilisational disasters is a complex task in which the population also has to take part, and the availability of geoinformation is a prerequisite for effective protection. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the combined power of both citizens and technology in the task of alerting and informing the public of the opportunities offered by virtual crowdsourcing, Web 2.0, the role of geoinformation, crisis maps, and drones through the application of a qualitative method, by analysing case studies and by searching for internal connections between different phenomena. Citizens around the world can collaborate and contribute to the sharing and collection of geoinformation to create real-time, interactive maps. These so-called crisis maps support intervention organisations in obtaining information, and they can also be used as sources of information. The use of Web 2.0, crisis maps and drones, as well as the emergence of digital humanitarian volunteering, have fundamentally changed the role of the public when it comes to responding to disasters, including alerting them using geoinformation.

Disaster, Infrastructure and Participatory Knowledge: The Planetary Response Network

There are many challenges involved in online participatory humanitarian response. We evaluate the Planetary Response Network (PRN), a collaboration between researchers, humanitarian organizations, and the online citizen science platform Zooniverse. The PRN uses satellite and aerial image analysis to provide stakeholders with high-level situational awareness during and after humanitarian crises. During past deployments, thousands of online volunteers have compared pre- and post-event satellite images to identify damage to infrastructure and buildings, access blockages, and signs of people in distress. In addition to collectively producing aggregated “heat maps” of features that are shared with responders and decision makers, individual volunteers may also flag novel features directly using integrated community discussion software. The online infrastructure facilitates worldwide participation even for geographically focused disasters; this widespread public participation means that high-value information can be delivered rapidly and uniformly even for large-scale crises. We discuss lessons learned from deployments, place the PRN’s distributed online approach in the context of more localized efforts, and identify future needs for the PRN and similar online crisis-mapping projects. The successes of the PRN demonstrate that effective online crisis mapping is possible on a generalized citizen science platform such as the Zooniverse.

Data-driven AI emergency planning in process industry

Whether it is through crisis mapping or event simulation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a pioneering new method of emergency planning. It uses the analysis of information or data from deep learning to predict the evacuation routes, allocate emergency resources reasonably and estimate the location of disaster. To overcome the difficulties of handling many resources emergency information and the variability of production environment, AI provides advanced analytics tools for processing and analyzing big data of emergency management. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of emergency planning technologies based on AI and discusses their applications in making emergency planning robust and efficiency. The development of AI technologies of emergency planning and their advantages over conventional data-driven emergency technologies are firstly discussed. Several representative emergency planning technologies based on deep learning models are compared. Finally, future trends and opportunities related to AI for emergency planning technologies are summarized.

Kolaborasi Pemerintah dan Masyarakat Sipil Merespon Covid-19 di Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta Melalui Pendekatan Crisis Visualizations

This research discusses the collaboration of the Yogyakarta Special Region government (DIY) and civil society in responding to Covid-19. This study analyzes the collaboration between the two by applying the crisis visualizations approach. Crisis visualization is a concept that describes visual crisis information, which aims to assist the public in mitigating risks and emergencies, as well as helping institutions and authorities in overcoming threats. In creating a visualization of the Covid-19 crisis, there are six techniques or forms, namely: crisis information in the form of temporal and geospatial visualizations (crisis maps); forecast trends and influences; the nature of the crisis; risk mitigation guidelines; visualization of risk, vulnerability and equity information; and measure the multi-effect impact of the crisis. The collaboration between the DIY government and civil society will be reviewed from the six techniques or forms of visualizing the Covid-19 crisis. This study uses a qualitative method. Data collection using interview techniques, literature study, and from internet sources. This study found that the collaboration between DIY government and civil society in crisis visualization does not occur directly. This research found that the making of visual crisis communication was managed only by the government. Community involvement occurs in the collection of raw data in the field to be conveyed to the government. This study found that the collaboration with civil society was built on the educational aspect, informal coordination which tended to be bottom-up approach, and promotion through the mass media.

The Technopolitics of Mapping Dar es Salaam: An examination of the technological and political motivations of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

Mapping has long formed a key part of development work, from recording household surveys, participatory mapping exercises, and PRA projects. Now though the sector is full of new actors- mapping and tech companies as well as NGOs- monitoring through drones and satellite images, alongside employing more traditional methods. Many of these new players were born from NGOs and companies who started as ‘crisis mappers. Short-term ‘crisis mapping’ projects have become a regular part of humanitarian response following a disaster. The short-term nature of such actions, and the need for stable employment/profits, has led to an increasing trend for the same organizations and companies to either remain on the ground producing maps or to move into new areas as part of a pre-emptive mapping practice, inserting themselves into the wider international development ecosystem. This research, centered on Tanzania, examines how HOTOSM has attempted to pivot towards working as a development organization that creates maps for prevention of crisis, but also wider socio-economic outputs. The research used interviews to explore the interplay between technology and micro/macro politics around the mapping of Dar es Salaam. Examining how HOTOSM its role, and how they position their map-making within the context of Dar es Salaam. Findings suggest that HOTOSM is still underdeveloped as an organization and lacks the maturity to create true participatory models of working.

Crisis mapping in the “senses” arena narratives

The Covid-19 pandemic is demonstrating the need for leaders to seek new solutions for supporting the pivotal role played by the non-profit context. The present paper is designed to investigate, in terms of crisis management and crisis communication, how non-profit organisations make sense through the mental map’s elements: sense-making, sense-giving, sense-breaking, and their outcomes on donors/volunteers’ intentions. Firstly, a semi-structured focus group was applied with the Federation of Three Children (OPOTTE) in Greece. Then, 36 semi-structured in depth-interviews proceeded, consisting of non-profit leaders that are managing branches of the Federation across Greece. Lastly, the “questerview “technique was used to enhance the credibility of the findings. The results revealed that Greek non-profit organisations are well-organized, as they are familiar with how to cope with an emergency. However, the reality of isolation was the only unfamiliar situation that had to be addressed. The crisis presents particular opportunities for future academic research and a basis for supporting policymakers, decision-makers, and non-profit leaders, grappling with an uncertain future.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12208-021-00319-x.

Rise of Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) in Southeast Asia: Social Media Insights for Crisis Mapping in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)

Digital technologies and big data speedily change humanitarian crisis response and transform the processes from traditional to digital. Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) for disaster risk reduction (DRR) using crisis mapping of the vulnerable population is becoming increasingly common during any disaster response process. To get the information and provide in time support, the critical Source of data is social media. In Southeast Asia, Facebook is the most used social media platform. Communities often rely on social media to seek in time assistance and guidance. Emerging social media and networks are remarkably well-compatible with intelligent data-centric systems, which foster an effective disaster management plan under disaster scenarios. During previous disasters in Southeast Asia, it was believed to be the fastest response medium. However, validation is essential to obtain important data, and after years of research, there are still many undiscovered features of social media that can be used in emergencies. This paper aims to determine Southeast Asian countries' readiness to utilise social media for DRR activities and understand the criteria of DHN by integrating crisis mapping. A qualitative research design is applied to gain an insight into the humanitarian disaster network for disaster risk reduction. Data were collected through document analysis. I argue that digital humanitarians can offer a unique combination of speed and safe access while escaping some of the traditional constraints of the aid-media relationship. The study concluded that DHN provides a collaborative environment for the organizations to collaborate and act fast to assist.

Crisis Map Design Considering Map Cognition

Crisis maps play a significant role in emergency responses. Users are challenged to interpret a map rapidly in emergencies, with limited visual information-processing resources and under time pressure. Therefore, cartographic techniques are required to facilitate their map cognition. In this study, we analyzed the exogenous and endogenous disruptions that users needed to overcome when they were reading maps. The analysis results suggested that cartographers’ taking the stressors into consideration could promote the cognitive fit between cartographers and users, improving map cognition and spatial information supply–demand matching. This paper also elaborates the course of map visual information processing and related graphic variables to visual attention attributes. To improve the users’ map cognition in time-critical emergency situations, crisis map design principles and a methodology were proposed. We developed three fire emergency rescue road maps and performed two evaluations to verify the effectiveness of the principles. Our experiments showed that the principles could effectively facilitate the users’ rapid map perception and proper understanding, by reducing their cognitive load, and could improve the quality of the crisis maps to some extent.

Interacting with VDL-based structured icons on crisis map for emergency coordination: Interactive design and experimental demonstration

Accurate and timely information sharing among multiple participants is one of the crucial factors for collaboration in crisis management. The icon-based map was frequently applied as an effective means for crisis interaction and collaboration. However, former studies only regarded the icons as supplementary visualization components during the whole crisis collaboration process. In this paper, the concept of a structured-icon-relied interactive method was proposed to directly integrate all kinds of crisis and coordination information through icons on the crisis map. Moreover, structured icons are supposed to explicitly show the correlation among crisis information and to improve the interactive experience of information search. The effectiveness of this interactive method was verified by a controlled experiment with three sub-tasks for simulated crisis rescue. The results of the experiment showed that the design of the crisis map based on structured icons had a positive impact on collaborative decision-making and crisis interaction. The dynamic characteristics of the structured icon could represent the temporal and spatial attributes of crisis information and enhance users’ crisis coordination ability. The study aims to enrich the theory of crisis information visualization and interaction based on structured iconic representation. In practice, this research could optimize the design of a crisis collaboration system based on the icon as well as the interaction between people, crisis information, and collaborative system, which in turn provides accurate and timely rescue decisions.

Tutorials

The tutorials presented at ICWSM 2013 included Advanced Methods for Collecting Social Science Data in the Social Media Field, presented by Riki Conrey; Information-Theoretic Tools for Social Media Analysis, presented by Greg Ver Steeg and Aram Galstyan; Crisis Mapping, Citizen Sensing, and Social Media Analytics: Leveraging Citizen Roles for Crisis Response, presented by Amit Sheth, Patrick Meier, Carlos Castillo, and Hemant Purohit; Multiple Network Models for Complex Online Social Network Analysis, presented by Matteo Magnani and Luca Rossi; and Pulse of Virtual Worlds: Behavioral Mining and SNA in Massive Online Games, presented by Muhammad Ahmad and Jaideep Srivastava.

CIME: Context-aware geolocation of emergency-related posts

Information extracted from social media has proven to be very useful in the domain of emergency management. An important task in emergency management is rapid crisis mapping, which aims to produce timely and reliable maps of affected areas. During an emergency, the volume of emergency-related posts is typically large, but only a small fraction is relevant and help rapid mapping effectively. Furthermore, posts are not useful for mapping purposes unless they are correctly geolocated and, on average, less than 2% of posts are natively georeferenced. This paper presents an algorithm, called CIME, that aims to identify and geolocate emergency-related posts that are relevant for mapping purposes. While native geocoordinates are most often missing, many posts contain geographical references in their metadata, such as texts or links that can be used by CIME to filter and geolocate information. In addition, social media creates a social network and each post can be enhanced with indirect information from the post’s network of relationships with other posts (for example, a retweet can be associated with other geographical references which are useful to geolocate the original tweet). To exploit all this information, CIME uses the concept of context, defined as the information characterizing a post both directly (the post’s metadata) and indirectly (the post’s network of relationships). The algorithm was evaluated on a recent major emergency event demonstrating better performance with respect to the state of the art in terms of total number of geolocated posts, geolocation accuracy and relevance for rapid mapping.

The role of crowdsourcing and social media in crisis mapping: a case study of a wildfire reaching Croatian City of Split

As climate change continues, wildfire outbreaks are becoming more frequent and more difficult to control. In mid-July 2017, a forest fire spread from the forests to the city of Split in Croatia. This unpredictable spread nearly caused emergency systems to collapse. Fortunately, a major tragedy was avoided due to the composure of the responsible services and the help of citizens. Citizens helped to extinguish the fire and provided a large amount of disaster-related information on various social media platforms in a timely manner. In this paper, we addressed the problem of identifying useful Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and georeferenced social media crowdsourcing data to improve situational awareness during the forest fire in the city of Split. In addition, social media data were combined with other external data sources (e.g., Sentinel-2 satellite imagery) and authoritative data to establish geographic relationships between wildfire phenomena and social media messages. This article highlights the importance of using georeferenced social media data and provides a different perspective for disaster management by filling gaps in authoritative data. Analyses from the presented reconstruction of events from multiple sources impact a better understanding of these types of events, knowledge sharing, and insights into crowdsourcing processes that can be incorporated into disaster management.

The Role of Emotions on Stakeholders’ Perceptions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Using Integrated Crisis Mapping (ICM) model, the researchers explored the role of emotions on respondents' perceptions of a university during the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the perceived level of engagement by the organization, the primary coping strategies of the stakeholders and the type of crisis and level of responsibility of the organization. This qualitative, phenomenological study explored how emotions experienced by faculty during the pandemic impacted their perception of the university. This study fills a gap in the crisis communication literature by focusing on stakeholder perspectives and proposes the addition of several emotions to the ICM model. It also details practical crisis response strategies that address stakeholders’ emotions during a health crisis.

Twitter Analysis based on Damage Detection and Geoparsing for Event Mapping Management

Background: Early event detection, monitor, and response can significantly decrease the impact of disasters. Lately, the usage of social media for detecting events has displayed hopeful results. Objectives: for event detection and mapping; the tweets will locate and monitor them on a map. This new approach uses grouped geoparsing then scoring for each tweet based on three spatial indicators. Method/Approach: Our approach uses a geoparsing technique to match a location in tweets to geographic locations of multiple-events tweets in Egypt country, administrative subdivision. Thus, additional geographic information acquired from the tweet itself to detect the actual locations that the user mentioned in the tweet. Results: The approach was developed from a large pool of tweets related to various crisis events over one year. Only all (very specific) tweets that were plotted on a crisis map to monitor these events. The tweets were analyzed through predefined geo-graphical displays, message content filters (damage, casualties). Conclusion: A method was implemented to predict the effective start of any crisis event and an inequity condition is applied to determine the end of the event. Results indicate that our automated filtering of information provides valuable information for operational response and crisis communication

Auto Neural Architecture Generator for UAV-Based Geospatial Surveillance for Aerial Crisis Mapping in Dark

Natural disasters such as flood, tsunami, earthquake and cyclones usually influence the microspaces and in urban areas, thereby causing the problem to rescuers to make way to the victims. Rescue operations in these situations are also hampered due to darkness caused by power cut and unavailability of other light sources to rescue people in peril or to even carry out evacuation operations. Therefore, we need solution to map all the essential large-scale feature spaces in dark to avail safety and saving numerous lives in disaster environments. This study presents a soft framework for crisis mapping in dark to map aerial view of geo-specific terrain in disaster struck areas so that effective map of debris and localization of victims can be achieved to enable strategic planning of rescue operations.

Assessing the Risk of Post-earthquake Fire and Presenting Risk Reduction Strategies in Qazvin and Markazi Provinces

INTRODUCTION: The location of Qazvin and Markazi provinces in high-seismicity regions has increased the probability of earthquake occurrence in these provinces. One of the most serious crises that threaten Qazvin and Markazi provinces is the post-earthquake fire which will be very probable considering the potential hazards. The present study aimed to identify the factors affecting the post-earthquake fire and present some strategies for pre-and post-earthquake preparedness in Qazvin and Markazi provinces. METHODS: In this descriptive-analytical study, the maps were produced using the Geographic Information System (GIS), and data collection sources were books, articles, and documents. Three main maps of risk, vulnerability, and crisis were prepared, and the analyses were performed by SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) table. Thereafter, some practical strategies and policies were presented to achieve the intended goals. Strategies were developed for four programs to mitigate risk likelihood and vulnerability, manage fire, and reconstruct, along with development. FINDINGS: As evidenced by the obtained, the dispersion of some man-made factors, such as power transmission lines, gas stations, and high-risk industries, increases the likelihood of post-earthquake fires in both provinces. Furthermore, such geographical factors as scattered vegetation and location in arid climates increase the probability of fire spread. The final map of the crisis demonstrated that fires are more likely to occur in the center of Qazvin province and the north of Markazi province. CONCLUSION: Based on the results of the present study, the first step in regional planning and policy-making for the mitigation of fire hazards must be based on crisis maps and in harmony with subsequent hazards and damages. In this regard, to mitigate the risk of post-earthquake in these two provinces, the following measures are suggested: increasing safety in infrastructure, networks, facilities, industrial estates, and high-risk industries.

A Quantitative Framework for Analyzing Spatial Dynamics of Flood Events: A Case Study of Super Cyclone Amphan

Identifying the flooding risk hotspot is crucial for aiding a rapid response and prioritizes mitigation efforts over large disaster impacted regions. While climate change is increasing the risk of floods in many vulnerable regions of the world, the commonly used crisis map is inefficient and cannot rapidly determine the spatial variation and intensity of flooding extension across the affected areas. In such cases, the Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) statistic can detect heterogeneity or the flooding hotspot at a local spatial scale beyond routine mapping. This area, however, has not yet been studied in the context of the magnitude of the floods. The present study incorporates the LISA methodology including Moran’s I and Getis–Ord Gi* to identify the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the occurrence of flooding from super cyclone Amphan across 16 coastal districts of Bangladesh. Using the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Sentinel-1 and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification, “water” and “land” were classified for the pre-event (16 May 2020) and post-events (22 May, 28 May, and 7 June 2020) of the area under study. A Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), and visual comparison were used to evaluate the flood maps. A compelling agreement was accomplished between the observed and predicted flood maps, with an overall precision of above 95% for all SAR classified images. As per this study, 2233 km2 (8%) of the region is estimated to have been inundated on 22 May. After this point, the intensity and aerial expansion of flood decreased to 1490 km2 by 28 May before it increased slightly to 1520 km2 (2.1% of the study area) on 7 June. The results from LISA indicated that the main flooding hotspots were located in the central part, particularly in the region off the north-east of the mangrove forest. A total of 238 Unions (smallest administrative units) were identified as high flooding hotspots (p < 0.05) on 22 May, but the number of flooding hotspots dropped to 166 in the second week (28 May) after Amphan subsided before it increased to a further 208 hotspots (p < 0.05) on 7 June due to incessant rainfall and riverbank failure in the south-west part of the study area. As such, an appropriate, timely, and cost-effective strategy would be to assess existing flooding management policies through the identified flooding hotspot regions. This identification would then allow for the creation of an improved policy to help curtail the destructive effects of flooding in the future.