In this lesson, we will focus on how GIS is used in response to emergency situations. GIS has tremendous potential for aiding disaster response, but as you will learn, it is not easy to work quickly to translate GIS analyses into actionable information when lives are at stake. Responders need to know where to go and how to get there, and emergency managers need to understand and react to a changing situational picture.
At the successful completion of Lesson 5, students should be able to:
If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them in the Lesson 5 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.
Lesson 5 is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific timeframes and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Work through Lesson 5. | You are in the Lesson 5 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now. |
2 | Complete the Lesson 5 Reading Assignment. | The Lesson 5 Reading Assignment is on Page 4. Note that there is a discussion assignment based on these readings. |
3 | Read and Respond to the Lesson 5 Emerging Theme. | On Page 5, you will find this week's Emerging Theme topic. You will need to read the material there and participate in a discussion. |
4 | Continue working on your Term Project. | As described on Page 6, you should make significant progress on the first draft of your Term Project this week. |
In the wake of a serious disaster, GIS managers are expected to provide a wide array of information with short deadlines for a variety of important tasks. First, it is essential for everyone involved to have a clear sense of the current situation, and to receive updates on the situational picture as time progresses. This can be a serious challenge because often a disaster can impact what types of data are available. As you may know already, on 9/11, the EOC for New York was located at 7 World Trade Center, and its state-of-the-art equipment and data were destroyed as a result of the attacks.
If you're interested, read more here on how GIS resources were developed on an ad hoc basis during the 9/11 crisis [2].
Any GIS plan for response to an emergency or crisis should consider several key questions:
Even contemporary web-based GIS systems present possible challenges in a real crisis situation. While cloud-hosted solutions can help avoid the risks associated with data storage in a single EOC, many disasters make internet access difficult or impossible. An interview by the GIS Monitor with Dean Hintz, a data interoperability consultant from SAFE Software [3] outlines some of the risks associated with Internet-based GIS solutions for crisis management:
"One of the big gaps [in disaster situations] seems to be real-time data. With good practices on archiving and good collaboration, we can generally get the basemap data OK. Even with the Tsunami response, the basemap data came together fairly rapidly, at least with regards to raster imagery and then, not too long after that, the vector data. The real challenge is disseminating real-time data. One of the good approaches on that is Web services. The limitation on that, however, is having some kind of Internet access. To fill that gap, these rapidly deployed WiFi networks in areas where emergency services are operating would certainly fill a critical gap. We have to make sure that the systems we design—if they depend on geoRSS, WFS, or WMS—have some sort of local caching. You may have intermittent service and you don't want your application to be just off-line as soon as your service drops. So, we have to develop fairly resilient systems that can handle intermittent service. That said, the more rapidly we can deploy a WiFi like that, the more up-to-date your information is going to be."
The rest of the interview is quite interesting [4]. Check it out if you are interested.
The most pressing need facing GIS managers during the immediate aftermath of a disaster is to estimate the impact of the disaster on the local population to determine where first-responders should focus rescue efforts. This problem requires an awareness of the scale and scope of the disaster as well as the ability to know where response resources are located, what their capabilities are, and what routes are available for them to take to those who need their help.
On the next page, you'll find your reading assignment for this week, where we'll delve deeper into how GIS is used during response activities, including a focus on the limitations of GIS systems in response situations.
The readings for this week focus on the fourth component of emergency management, response. You will read a short chapter in your text and two papers that address two contemporary challenges for GIS applied to response actions.
What are the key inter-agency coordination issues that should be considered to make a GIS-based response effort successful? How might recent advances in location-based services change the ways in which emergency management professionals and the public interact through geospatial information and technologies to respond to a disaster?
Please read the Discussion Instructions in the last box below for details on how to complete this assignment.
This paper describes an approach from the Civil Engineering community to monitor and report on the status of buildings to provide evacuation guidance during an emergency situation.
What aspects of the proposed model do you think would work well? Are there missing components that you'd want to see considered as well?
Please read the Discussion Instructions in the last box below for details on how to complete this assignment.
There have been 3D geospatial systems around for quite some time to represent the 3D characteristics of landscapes (both manmade and natural) – why are these systems not yet widely available for application in urban emergency management contexts?
This paper highlights how VGI can contribute to the development of 3D building models. What needs to happen before we could A) obtain complete coverages of areas at risk for disasters and B) before emergency managers can really use such data to augment their response actions?
I've left you with lots of choices here to respond to across each of these three prompts - please choose one of them to respond to yourself, and then respond to at least one of your classmates' postings with your reflections and/or pointers to relevant outside resources. Feel free to advance the conversation beyond the starting points I've given you here - the goal, as in previous discussion assignments, is to evolve our conversations and go deeper into these topics together.
The use of gaming principles in the design of technologies and practices in what are typically viewed as non-gaming situations is called Gamification. This trend has become very popular in recent years as researchers have discovered new ways to motivate people to do serious (and not-so-serious) tasks by using tricks from game design. As you'll see in the talks I've selected for this week, there are both pyschological affordances as well as new technical advances that make Gamification possible and desirable.
This talk by Seth Priebatsch [7] of SCVNGR [8] is a bit frenetic and breathless, but it helps describe several of the key psychological motivators that can be leveraged to embed gaming concepts into any imaginable task. This video is a bit old, but it nicely presents some of the key concepts around gamification that I would like you to consider. I’d also like you to reflect on what has changed and what has stayed the same since this presentation with regard to gamification in general and in emergency management. His examples are about pretty mundane things, but I'm sure you can envision how these concepts could be embedded with topics relevant to our class, to motivate the development of VGI, for example.
The second talk I'd like you to watch is by Will Wright [9]. Will designed SimCity and has had a hand in dozens of other influential games since then. Will gave a keynote speech for Where 2.0 in 2012, focusing on the intersection of gaming and reality. As Will sees the world, the age of simulations in gaming has progressed now into a phase where we are, instead, able to actually parse reality. If you extend this line of thinking into disaster management, one could argue that we're at a tipping point now where gaming could be used to develop fast intelligence (situational awareness) from the enormous and complex data streams that start arriving the moment a crisis occurs.
There are several examples now of the use of gaming principles to underpin otherwise mundane tasks in the geospatial realm. Quite a lot of innovation in this area is happening around VGI platforms like OpenStreetMap. Check out MapRoulette [10] (more info about MapRoulette here [11]), which attempts to motivate new contributions to OSM by encouraging a culture of healthy competition among users.
A recent geogame that's become wildly popular is GeoGuessr [12], a game which plops you down onto a street in Google Street View and asks you to try and identify exactly where you're located. It's hard to do, and addictive. It appears that the GeoGuessr team [13] doesn't have alternative motives aside from creating an enjoyable game, but I bet you can think of some interesting ways in which this kind of game could lead to cleaner datasets, better geocoding, crowdsourced image analysis, etc... right?
Note: Post your deliverable in the Lesson 5 Emerging Themes Discussion Forum in Canvas [14].
This week, you should be making significant progress on the first draft of your term project. Your goal should be to make the first draft as high-quality as possible, with the idea that doing so will mean you have less work ahead of you to complete your second (and final) draft.
I have designed the timing of this assignment so that I have time to read your full drafts, offer feedback and editing suggestions, and return them to you with enough time left in the course so that you can revise your work before submitting a final version.
Here are my expectations for your first draft, which will be due at the end of Lesson 6:
This week, you should complete at least the first half of your term project draft. You will have all of this week and next week to complete your first draft, and since you have other assignments in this course, I recommend you manage your time accordingly.
If you're like me and you have trouble getting started on writing assignments, consider this piece of advice I heard from a colleague about completing a PhD dissertation:
"Every day, set aside a writing task for yourself that is so small that you cannot possibly fail to complete it."
When I was writing my dissertation, I set little goals for myself every day that mirrored this advice. For me, it worked best to set a specific wordcount that I had to achieve every day. For you, there may be better ways to motivate yourself, so your mileage may vary.
Remember, if you have any questions while you are working on your first draft, just send me an e-mail or leave a post on the Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.
Effective response to a disaster depends on quickly synthesizing actionable information and disseminating that information to responders in the field. GIS is frequently used to assemble the "big picture" in a disaster. Among other things, it is essential for a GIS system to help decision makers understand where first responder resources are located and where help is needed.
This week, we also focused attention on another challenge for GIS in response situations. Quite often, a significant disaster will destroy the infrastructure that had been designed to support emergency management. We learned about how an ad hoc system was developed in New York after 9/11. One way of avoiding this kind of problem is to distribute the emergency management GIS system through a local network or via the Internet where it can be accessed from multiple entry points. This type of GIS solution makes it less important that all emergency management personnel are in the same place.
Up to this point, we have covered mitigation, preparedness, and response topics for emergency management GIS. In the next lesson, we will move on to the final stage of emergency management and explore how GIS is used in longer-term recovery efforts to rebuild disaster areas.
If there is anything in the lesson materials that you would like to comment on or add to, feel free to post your thoughts to the Lesson 5 Questions and Comments Discussion. For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson? Was there anything useful here that you'd like to try in your own work?
Links
[1] http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2500.htm
[2] http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0102articles/nyc-creating.html
[3] http://www.safe.com
[4] http://archives.profsurv.com/magazine/article.aspx?i=70147#Disaster_Response
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/Guven_etal_2012.pdf
[6] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/Goetz-Zipf_2012_OSM-3D.pdf
[7] https://twitter.com/sethpriebatsch
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCVNGR
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)
[10] http://maproulette.org/
[11] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapRoulette
[12] http://geoguessr.com/
[13] http://geoguessr.com/retro/about.htm
[14] http://psu.instructure.com