In the aftermath of a disaster, knowing the condition of buildings, infrastructure, and utilities is critical to both immediate response and long-term recovery efforts. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is often asked to help identify damage to buildings and other assets in the affected region. In the past, limitations in post-disaster imagery and difficulties in identifying building damage from aerial views have hindered these efforts.
In a current research project, the GIScience Research Group / HeiGIT supports HOT, Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI), the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and the University of Colorado, Boulder in improving how building damage information can be gathered through crowdsourcing. We intend for the methods and tools we are developing to better facilitate the contributions of online volunteers, and to maximize the impact of those contributions to disaster response and recovery processes.
In the scope of the project we developed three experiments that are geared toward better understanding the crowd’s ability to assess building damage from satellite imagery. The first survey is a building-level damage assessment set up in OSM, while the other two are novel area-based damage assessments.
Please find the experiments here:
We are now seeking participation from you to test our approach and enable taking crowdsourced damage assessments further!
To learn about your experience and improve our survey, we would appreciate
if you could provide your feedback in the user survey that is linked in the
damage assessment experiments. The consent forms for this research can be found
here, please contact sloos@stanford.edu if you have any related question.
We appreciate your help and thank you in advance for your contribution!