Both Atlas Obscura and CityLab look at efforts by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to update and improve the quality of maps in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Previously: Volunteers Mapping Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico.
Tag: humanitarian
Volunteers Mapping Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico
When disaster strikes, crowdmapping kicks into high gear. Last Friday, six universities hosted mapathons where volunteers, using satellite imagery, contributed to the map of Puerto Rico and other hurricane-damaged areas on OpenStreetMap. More from one of the universities involved. Here’s the relevant project page on the OSM Wiki.
Facebook’s Disaster Maps
Today Facebook announced disaster maps for use by relief organizations. Based on aggregated and anonymized user data, the maps of users’ location, movement and check-ins can, Facebook says, provide relief organizations with valuable information about where the need is greatest. At launch only the Red Cross, UNICEF and the World Food Programme will have access to the data; a process will be established to determine how it will be shared with others. [Engadget]
NPR Profiles Crisis Mapper
Here’s an NPR profile of crisis mapper Patrick Meier, who was spurred into action by the 2010 Haitian earthquake and later went on to co-found the Digital Humanitarian Network.
With the Haiti earthquake, he had a chance to put everything he’d been thinking about into practice. He and some friends and colleagues began pulling information from social media—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube videos—and added it to a base map to start to get a picture of the damage in Haiti. They plotted points on the map in red dots, indicating pharmacies that were open, which ones did and didn’t have medicines, which roads were blocked, where people were trapped under rubble and needed help.
As the days went on, the effort attracted thousands of volunteers from 40 countries around the world, all wrangling tweets, text messages, videos, emails, Facebook posts and other messages. A special toll-free number was set up for people in Haiti to send text messages about their conditions and whereabouts. Meanwhile, Meier and his team in the U.S., including members of Haitian diaspora, worked around the clock, funneling a flood of information into a constantly evolving map.
Mapping the Refugee Crisis
Here are two interactive maps that show the scale of recent refugee migrations. Lucify’s interactive map (screenshot above) shows the flow of asylum seekers to European countries since 2012. And this interactive map, compiled by The Conversation from UNHCR data, shows the size of refugee populations originating from or residing within each country from 1975 to 2010. In each case, the numbers grow with each passing year. More from Scientific American’s SA Visual blog. [via]
Mapping Aid Worker Attacks
An interactive map of attacks on aid workers since 2000. IRIN: “This map, a joint product between IRIN and Humanitarian Outcomes, is the first time ever the full scope of aid worker security events has been presented in visual form, which can be searched and filtered and browsed. It shows events from the beginning of 2000 until the end of May 2015. It’s a sobering testament to the dangerous work of saving lives.” [via]