Rapid integration of post-disaster data sources – Sabine Loos (Geo4Dev 2018)

Sabine Loos is a Ph.D. researcher and National Science Foundation Fellow with the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative. Her work focuses on the collection and integration of post-disaster geospatial data to estimate regional damage and losses. Currently, she is part of an Innovation Fund team researching the factors that led to different rates of community recovery after the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

Outside of her current work, Sabine has developed methods to crowdsource building damage using satellite imagery with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and validate inSAR-based damage proxy maps with NASA-JPL/ARIA.

Sabine Loos’ talk is titled: Rapid integration of post-disaster data sources: a basis for impact estimation for recovery planning
Within the first few months after a disaster, a vast amount of geospatial data must be coalesced and interpreted to understand the scale of impact. Currently, many response and recovery practitioners collect and analyze this data in an ad-hoc manner to inform decisions that shape that region’s recovery. This talk will review a geostatistical framework that can be used to collect and integrate these data sources  (e.g. remotely sensed, field surveys, etc), specifically for rapidly estimating regional impact. We apply this framework using a sample of field surveys and multiple auxiliary geospatial datasets to estimate building damage from the 2015 Nepal earthquake. These regional impact estimates go on to inform international aid requests and follow-on recovery policies. Thus, this project is also considering how we measure disaster ‘impact’ and its relation to community resilience. In addition to the integration framework, we are working with Kathmandu Living Labs to collect more household data (3 years post-earthquake) to relate social, economic, and physical factors to differential community recoveries. While we are still in the data collection phase, I can describe the overarching scope of this part of the project depending on the format of my presentation.

The 2nd Annual Symposium on Geospatial Analysis for International Development (Geo4Dev) focused on geospatial research that addresses climate- and conflict-driven migration and humanitarian response. This includes observation and modeling of migration and human settlement patterns (in response to climate or conflict stressors), as well as the design and evaluation of interventions for humanitarian crises, mass migration, and community resilience.

Geo4Dev is a yearly event focused on the use of novel geospatial data and analytic techniques to address issues of poverty, sustainable development, urbanization, climate change, and economic growth in developing countries and beyond. This includes a particular emphasis on the use of emerging geo-tagged big data, including satellite, social media, and CDR datasets.