GIScience support for Crowdsourced Damage Assessment project at Stanford University

In the aftermath of natural disasters an assessment of the impact and damage in the affected area is crucial to enable coordination of response and recovery. While the disaster preparedness and response activations by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in regard to infrastructure mapping have already proven great potential in various disaster events, due to a lack of accessibility of post-disaster imagery, the available image quality and the general complexity of precise damage mapping using remote sensing, damage assessment using crowdsourcing methods still poses a serious challenge.

The GIScience Research Group currently partners with the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI), the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and the University of Colorado, Boulder to address this limitation.

Benjamin Herfort and Melanie Eckle of the GIScience Research Group have been supporting the project by developing experiments to enable area based damage assessments and comparative damage rankings by volunteers. The final experiments will be launched and shared by the end of May. Please find out more about the project here: https://www.hotosm.org/updates/2017-04-26_hot_research_partnership_on_crowdsourced_damage_assessment