A magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit south-eastern Turkey and parts of Syria in the early hours of the morning of 6 February, causing widespread devastation, with an estimated 45,000 deaths and 11,000 injured.
On the same night, 30 students from Clark University congregated in the Jefferson GIS lab to do a mapathon.
Mapping event for Public Good
The University students conducted a Mapathon, using GIS technology to convert satellite imagery into maps showing the location of roads, buildings, bridges, and other features in the earthquake impacted areas to aid relief organizations in their search and rescue operation.
A mapathon is a coordinated mapping event where the public is invited to make online map improvements in their local or international area to improve coverage and support disaster risk assessment and resource management activities. The participants needn’t have any previous experience.
It becomes a great opportunity for volunteers to digitally connect and map the most vulnerable or already affected places so that local and international NGO’s can use these maps and data to better respond to crises.
OpenStreetMap or Google Maps are used as a repository for storing these map data. Mapathons also create a community of global volunteers who want to make an impact and help national and international humanitarian works and through capacity building workshops.
The Department of International Development, Community, and Environment and the Graduate School of Geography was responsible for coordinating the mapathon. Two master’s students in GIS program, Claudia Buszta and André de Oliveira Domingues was responsible for organization.
The mapathons attendance that night represented a mix of undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students from various majors. The attendees were asked to identify structures that show up as shadows and shapes in the images captured by the satellite.
Humanitarian Open Street Maps
This particular event supported the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) in the creation of openly accessible data for offline maps that could be used by emergency response teams.
HOT is an ongoing project to make digitized, high-resolution maps, similar to high resolution images produced by the Google Earth, which is available for public use, including by relief agencies, from the Red Cross to the United Nations.
Geography professor John Rogan stated that HOT is valuable for those responding to the Turkey/Syria sites to have information on what roads and buildings exist in the affected areas as some of the structures may have been fragmented or collapsed as they assess the conditions on the ground and plot their disaster-response strategies.
This idea of a mapathon had germinated in the mind of Corey Dickinson who is a consultant with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Ankara, Turkey who understood the need of the assistance of crowd sourced mapping.
De Oliveira Domingues said the mapathon participants looked for particular features in the satellite images, such as clusters of squares that may be identified and could be pointed to a neighborhood and major roadways which in turn can be helpful to emergency vehicles to pass through.
When a certain map segment was completed, the students then uploaded the information, which was analyzed and verified by mappers working with one of the coordinating groups. Most of the areas were undermapped as they were rural regions or had been conflict prone zones.
Hundreds of data points were created that will be key to relief and recovery efforts now and deep into the future.
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