This week, we will tackle our second collaborative project. This collaborative assignment is designed to pull together what you have learned so far in this class and apply it toward researching and critiquing the use of GIS in a recent disaster. You will work in teams to gather and condense information to explain and critique how GIS was used in a real crisis situation - the 2015 Nepal Earthquake.
At the successful completion of Lesson 8, students should be able to:
If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them on the Lesson 8 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.
Lesson 8 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 8. | You are in the Lesson 8 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now. |
2 | Complete the Lesson 8 Group Writing Assignment. | On Page 3, you will find instructions for the Group Writing assignment I want you to complete this week. You will work in groups to research a recent disaster and the ways in which GIS was applied toward each stage of emergency management in that situation. |
3 | Read and respond to the Emerging Theme topic for Lesson 8. | This week's Emerging Theme topic can be found on Page 7. Review the materials there and participate in discussion as directed. |
4 | Review feedback on your first draft of your Term Project. | I will return edited versions of your Term Project early this week. You should review my comments and begin working on revisions this week. |
This week, I would like you to work together to research key phases of emergency management and the use of GIS to support those activities for a recent disaster. I've also included a link to relevant datasets to give you something to analyze to add context to the other things you manage to find.
**For Fall 2017** -- Paul and Kevin work on Response topic and Diena and Madelyn work on Recovery topic
The disaster I want you to research is the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, which caused massive loss of life and property in Kathmandu and other places across the country of Nepal. Each group should create a short report for their phase of emergency management according to the following criteria:
I have created pages in this lesson for each group to edit.
I encourage you to use the commenting areas and e-mail to coordinate your group activities and make sure that everyone in your group shares the burden of this assignment.
The pages following these instructions are blank and identified by Group number and topic (Group 1: Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation, for example).
To complete the group writing assignment you will need to click on the "edit" tab at the top of your group's page and enter content using the editor. You can embed pictures, format sections, change colors, etc... using this editor.
I recommend you save your edits *frequently* by clicking the "Submit" button at the bottom of the editor page. Before you click the "Submit" button, expand the "Publishing Options" section at the bottom of the page and make sure that "Published" and "Create new revision" boxes are checked, and the other boxes are unchecked.
If you have problems editing/submitting content using the page editor, e-mail me so I can help!
I'll assign grades by group, and your grade will be based on your work's content, clarity, impact, and the degree to which your submission satisifies assignment guidelines. For each of the four criteria, I will assign points on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being excellent and 1 being very poor. I define "Impact" as the strength and logic of the arguments and analytical insights you provide with your writing. I define "Content" as the level of understanding and knowledge of relevant topics you demonstrate with your writing. I define "Clarity" as the readability and organization of your writing (including formatting and appropriate graphic design where applicable). I define "Meets Criteria" as the degree to which your work satisifies the guidelines provided with the assignment.
Response: April 2015 Earthquake, Nepal
The April 2015 Nepal earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.8M, occurred at 1156 hrs Nepal Standard Time on 25 APR 15. The epicenter of the earthquake was in the vicinity of Barpak in the Nepalese District of Gorkha, approximately 34KM from Lamjung, Nepal. High magnitude aftershocks, also described as other major earthquakes, associated with the 25 APR 15 earthquake, continued through 12 MAY 15. Estimates of earthquake related deaths and injuries in Nepal vary widely from 430 killed and 753 wounded to 8,800 killed and between16,000 and 23,000 wounded. An estimated 2.8 million people were reportedly displaced due to effects of the earthquake. Death and injuries associated with the earthquake were also reported in India, China, and Bangladesh.
Clipped from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake [3]
The earthquake resulted in significant damage to or collapse of private, business, and government infrastructure, with some estimates indicating 40% of Nepal was impacted by the earthquake. Early estimates of the overall damage were between USD 10 and 15 billion. Earthquake damage included:
Natural disaster related to the earthquake including landslides and avalanches also impacted infrastructure and people, especially rural infrastructure and people located in less accessible mountainous terrain.
Satellite footage of the nine-storey, 61.88-metre-tall tower at Sundhara in Kathmandu, before and after the earthquake. Credit: DigitalGlobe. Clipped from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake [3]
Key Stakeholders in the recovery phase of the earthquake include people and organizations. Stakeholders can be roughly divided into “Directly Impacted”, “Indirectly Impacted”, “Responding (not impacted), and “Impacted and Responding” categories.
Geographic information proved to be critical in the Gorkha quake and its aftermath, especially in the response phase, where lives hung in the balance due to inadequate transportation and building footprint maps. Fortunately, geospatial resources from around the globe, from satellite imaging to GPS-equiped cell phones, from expert imagery interpreters to volunteer mappers, kicked into action almost immediately. The global effort was led by the local organization, Kathmandu Living Labs [4] (KLL), a community of volunteers formed in 2012 to creat a central repository [5] for geo-located needs data to be used for relief efforts. KLL coordinated with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) [6], Mapbox Bangalore [7], Nepal Monitor [8] and Parewa Labs [9], to unite 2,182 mappers from around the world to contribute to the OpenStreetMap platform [10], performing 58,250 edits to highways and 91,850 edits to buildings taken from over 14,700 km2 worth of high resolution satellite imagery.
OSM Contributors at Kathmandu Living Labs [11] operational one day after the earthquake. They support the government and international organizations from Kathmandu while the global OSM community rapidly improve the map from afar
Learning from previous experience during earthquakes in Haiti (date) and Indonesia (date), the HOTOSM mappers used a validation system to reduce error, with every edit passing before at least 1 other mapper, before being reviewed by more expert map editors. Local volunteers, some equiped with drones, were also employed to ground truth the OSM data. Where earlier crowdsource mapping responses had foundered trying to get the product of these efforts into the hands of those organizations who need them, the Nepal effort benefited from a strong prior relationship between KLL and the Red Cross.
Poised for action: Aeryon's sUAVs were instrumental to mapping regions of devastation to help GlobalMedic relief workers. (GlobalMedic) Clipped from: http://spie.org/newsroom/052115-nepal-quake?SSO=1 [12]
The KLL and HOTOSM efforts were supplemented by social media information that they collected from Facebook posts and Tweets and organised into a quake map. This was then shared with relief groups and the Nepal Army. About 40% of Nepalese are online, and that primarily in urban centers, but it was found that people in remote areas were texting friends and family in the cities for them to post online their pleas for relief and news of missing loved ones, and despite traffic-laden networks, social media exploded with valuable information. These resources were used by social media groups like the Rapid Response Team [13] and Sankalpa [14] to convert Facebook posts, Tweets, and SMS text messages into relief maps.
Social media crowdsourcing also factored into the use of satellite imagery. The Digital Globe company deployed their Tomnod crowdsourcing platform, which allows volunteers to pour over thousands of square kilometers of imagery, comparing and tagging imagery with damaged structures and infrastructure. The crowdsourced imagery is then run through an alborithm that identifies frequently tagged agreements to identify areas most in need. Both Digital Globe and the joint United Nations and European Commission initiative, UN satellite imagery program, UNOSAT, tasked their Synthetic Aperture Radar and hyperspectral, high resolution satellites to start mapping the region, and much of the data was made available in UNOSAT's Live Web Map [15]. UNOSAT has also developed a smartphone app that uploads photos from volunteers directly to their web map, which was deployed to volunteers on the ground in Nepal to geospatially document damage.
Our team has developed the following response phase analytic product, taking crowdsourced landslide map data, buffering it to 1 mile to simulate larger population effects, and clipping a population density raster to the extent of the landslide zones. A color ramp is applied to indicate the concentrations of populations who are likely to be effected by landslides, and may require evacuation. Furthermore, transportation layers are added to help plan evacuations, first a layer of major roadways not effected by the landslides, and then sections of major roadways that are suspected to be damaged by the landslides, including bridges, tunnels, causeways, and ferry/ford crossings. This gives an indication of where the most vulnerable populations are, as well as the most likely roadways available for evacuation efforts.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2015_Nepal_earthquake
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nepal-earthquake-of-2015
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32479909
https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/nepal/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-nepal-earthquake
https://www.usaid.gov/nepal-earthquake/fy15/fs01
http://sites.dartmouth.edu/NepalQuake-CaseStudies/engineering-infrastructure-design/
https://qz.com/409484/the-economic-damage-from-the-nepal-earthquake-is-almost-half-of-the-countrys-gdp/
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/3/nepal-earthquake.html
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/546211467998818313/pdf/97501-WP-PUBLIC-Box391481B-nepal-post-disaster-needs-assement-report-PUBLIC.pdf
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake [3]
http://spie.org/newsroom/052115-nepal-quake?SSO=1 [12]
https://qz.com/406562/how-social-media-is-helping-nepal-rebuild-after-two-big-earthquakes-2/ [16]
On Saturday, 25 April 2015 at 11:56 NST, a severe earthquake (7.8 magnitude) hit Nepal followed by a second earthquake ( 6.3 magnitude) on May 12. More than 9000 people were killed and 16.800 were injured, almost 3.5 million people were left homeless and "600,000 structures were either damaged or destroyed" (Rafferty, 2017).The Tribhuvan International Airport was closed after the earthquake, the runway was damaged and most of the airport workers were killed or had to deal with the earthquake consequences. Several of the churches, temples, UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Dharahara tower, which was built in 1832, and many schools have been collapsed. 14 hydropower projects out of 23 operative projects have been damaged. Diseases, starving children and lack of drinking water can be seen all around the country, many girls and women have been sold to other countries by human traffickers after the earthquake. As IHS Global Insights stated the expected cost for rebuilding homes, roads and bridges could run up to $5 billion, where the overall economic damage is estimated to be at about $10 billion, and property loss equivalent to USD 3.5 billion (Amnesty International, 2015; World Economic Forum, 2015).
Map1. Nepal Earthquake (Rafferty, 2017).
Figure1. Nepal aftershock damage (Rafferty, 2017).
After the earthquake the government of Nepal (GoN) established the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) to guarantee improved and safer resistant residence and buildings for the public. The authority focuses on the reconstruction and resettlement efforts using the support of various international donors. Local government ministries and agencies, national development partners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), and recovery stakeholders have to identify the recovery and reconstruction priorities and the implementation challenges as follows:
Provide and distribute funding to reconstruct houses and buildings.
Determine the environmental effect.
Land acquisition and land registration operations
New reconstruction guideline and framework
Working and communicate with non-governmental organizations
Public and volunteers procurement.
The United Nations, International NGOs and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies immediately prepared resources and reprogrammed activities. The Government of India created humanitarian missions to aid the public. The United Kingdom, China Israel, UNICEF, and the United States have donated different aid to the Nepali government. After the Nepal earthquake; different actors played huge role at the respond and recovery stage. Their participation was to collect, provide, and use spatial data; their focus was to generate crowdsourced data and putting it together with open government data for a better and faster recovery. These actors are:
“Kathmandu Living Labs(KLL)
Young Innovations Ltd
Local Interventions Group
Open Nepal
Code for Nepal" (Verhulst et al., 2017)
for the Nepal earthquake recovery stage watch, on the road to recovery https://youtu.be/hnc6hvwyv40 [17]
Directly after the earthquakes, KLL began to build a detailed map of affected areas using their pre-earthquake mapping work. KLL used social media images to map the damaged areas on foot, these maps have been used by national and international organizations such as Red Cross and UN to organize and plan the resources. Moreover volunteers used the post-earthquake satellite images to update the KLL maps. KLL develop a website (QuakeMap.Org) that can help people in reporting their needs to the emergency management organizations. Open Nepal and Young Innovations launched a centralized portal (Earthquake Response Transparency Portal) that can project and track national and international aids using different data such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Financial Tracking Service (FTS) data, national and international media data, and government and non-government data. All these data has been cleaned and standardized. LIG and Nepal government used different data and information from open governance, crowdsourcing, smarter city solutions and Google to create GIS maps to locate the rebuilding and reconstruction efforts and show human trafficking hotspots and routes. The Humanitarian Data Exchange HDX team set up Housing Recovery and Reconstruction (HRRP 4W) tool to show where, what when, and to whom planned and operating projects are going to.
Map2. Nepal earthquake, GIS Use in Public Health & Healthcare (Nepal earthquake, GIS Use in Public Health & Healthcare, 2017)
Journalists and media played a big role during the recovery stage, they used open source data and the Earthquake Response Transparency Portal to geospatially reports the aids and the distributions. Moreover the media published different surveys of the reconstruction work, and provide a precise viewpoint of the successfully used aids and their distribution. But the media often failed to show the difference between initiates, promises and actual payments or funds, so the CSOs and NGOs used the portal to investigate aids resources and distribution to show areas for potential rebuilding projects and plan the government contributions on the reconstructing process. The Nepal government including the National Planning Commission and the Prime Minister of Nepal played an important role in the success of the Nepali recovery stage by promotes transparency and allow the use of open data projects, to show where rehabilitation funds being used and allocated to facilitate and ensure a fast and healthy earthquake recovery.Many of the online volunteers did not have any experience with the spatial data and the format that has been used inside the portal, which badly affect and delay the data collection and analysis stage.
Map3. Describes damaged and destroyed structures during Nepal earthquake 2015. The data has been collected and interrupted by NGA using satellite images. (The created analytical map has been created and developed by Group 2, using the provided datasets at Lesson8 group assignment page)
References:
Amnesty International, 2015. Nepal Earthquake Recovery Must Safeguard Human Right. Amnesty International Limited. United Kingdom, London.
Nepal earthquake, GIS Use in Public Health & Healthcare. (2017). [image] Available at: https://healthmap.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/nepal-relief-map-immappler-comnepalrelief/ [18] [Accessed 10 Oct. 2017].
Rafferty, J. (2017). Nepal earthquake of 2015 | Magnitude, Death Toll, Aftermath, & Facts. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nepal-earthquake-of-2015 [19] [Accessed 8 Oct. 2017].
Verhulst, S., Young, A., Bista, S. and McMurren, J. (2017). OPEN DATA FOR DEVELOPING ECONOMIES CASE STUDIES. [online] www.odimpact.org. Available at: http://odimpact.org/files/case-nepal.pdf [20] [Accessed 9 Oct. 2017].
Despite the onslaught of new media sources that include images (both moving and still) and audio streams, we still face a challenge today when it comes to analyzing the information included in text. Twitter, Facebook status updates, blog posts, e-mail, etc... all still at their core rely heavily on text to communicate information between users. This introduces a challenge for geographers - we'd like to know which places are talked about in these conversations. So, how can we extract locations and map them?
The science of Natural Language Processing is a burgeoning area of inquiry that has resulted in a lot of progress on training systems to extract, recognize, and place into context all aspects of what we try to communicate through text. More specifically, named entity recognition [21] (NER) can be used to extract location mentions from text sources. As the video lecture here from Stanford professors Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning shows, NER is a relatively mature technology now, but there remain some substantial challenges associated with recognizing and reducing ambiguity and interpretation problems when it comes to natural language processing.
Once you have extracted location entities from text, you then need to geolocate them. This is also a non-trivial step, even with contemporary methods. Many places have alternate spellings, informal references (LA = Los Angeles, Happy Valley = State College area), and duplicate names abound [22] for nearly every place you can imagine. One good thing is that we've got a great gazetteer already of named places around the world - in the form of GeoNames [23]. GeoNames also provides a service for geocoding using their gazetteer. For projects like SensePlace2 at Penn State, we first rely on customized NER software to extract location names, and then we run things through GeoNames to try and attach coordinates to those locations. Because each step is far from perfect, we're doing work now on refining both sides of that process to deliver better accuracy in location extraction from text. In the screenshow below, you can see our GeoTxt project, which has a simple web interface, but is primarily designed to be used at the API level by other programs to deliver better quality location extraction from text sources. You can try GeoTxt [24] yourself now (just paste in some text you've got with placenames included).
By now, you should have received my feedback on the first draft you submitted in Lesson 6. You now have until the end of Lesson 10 to submit your final draft, so you should dedicate some time this week toward incorporating some of the suggestions I've given to improve your paper.
If you are unclear about any of my comments or suggestions, get in touch so I can clarify things for you.
This lesson gave you an opportunity to work with your classmates and explore for yourself how GIS was applied in a recent crisis situation. I think it is particularly important for us to look at real-world case studies like these to suggest new ways in which we might plan more effective GIS systems for emergency management. Every year brings with it new types of GIS technology, as well as serious disasters in places and situations we may not have anticipated.
If there is anything in the lesson materials that you would like to comment on or add to, feel free to post your thoughts on the Lesson 8 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas. 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://ds.iris.edu/spud/gmv/9925699
[2] https://data.humdata.org/group/nepal-earthquake
[3] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathmandu_Living_Labs
[5] http://quakemap.org/
[6] http://hotosm.org/
[7] https://www.mapbox.com/blog/nepal-earthquake/
[8] https://nepalmonitor.org/
[9] http://parewalabs.com/
[10] http://openstreetmap.org/
[11] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kathmandu_Living_Labs
[12] http://spie.org/newsroom/052115-nepal-quake?SSO=1
[13] https://www.facebook.com/pg/rrtnepal/about/?ref=page_internal
[14] https://www.facebook.com/SankalpaPkr?fref=ts
[15] https://unosat.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=b9f9da798f364cd6a6e68fc20f5475eb
[16] https://qz.com/406562/how-social-media-is-helping-nepal-rebuild-after-two-big-earthquakes-2/
[17] https://youtu.be/hnc6hvwyv40
[18] https://healthmap.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/nepal-relief-map-immappler-comnepalrelief/
[19] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nepal-earthquake-of-2015
[20] http://odimpact.org/files/case-nepal.pdf
[21] http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
[22] http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=springfield&country=&featureClass=P&continentCode=
[23] http://www.geonames.org/
[24] http://www.geotxt.org