Volunteered geographic information use in crisis, emergency and disaster management: a scoping review and a web atlas

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, an increasing number of crises worldwide, triggered by climate extremes, natural and human-made hazards, the coronavirus pandemic, and more, pose a high pressure on crisis, emergency, and disaster management. Spatial data and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) are key issues in the successful and immediate response to crises. This paper aims to explore the use of VGI in crisis management, including emergency and disaster management, based on a scoping review of existing literature in English for five years (2016–2020). Specifically, the research intends to answer Scoping Review Questions (SRQ) regarding the use of VGI in crisis, emergency, and disaster management, and the verified cases’ spatial distribution, the VGI sources utilized (e.g. OpenStreetMap – OSM, Crowdsourcing, Twitter), the types of hazards (e.g. natural and human-made hazards, pandemic), the specific tasks in crisis, emergency or disaster management and VGI use in the management of actual crisis events, e.g. COVID-19 pandemic, Hurricane Katrina, etc. Eligible papers on VGI use in crisis, emergency, and disaster management are geolocated based on first-author affiliation, and as a result, a spatial bibliography is provided. Thus, the term Spatial Scoping Review is introduced. Scoping Review Questions are answered, and the results are analyzed and discussed. Finally, implementing the “VGICED Atlas”, a web atlas, permits the publication of the research results to a broad audience and the visualization of the analysis with several interactive maps.

KEYWORDS:

• Volunteered geographic information (VGI)
• crisis management
• emergency management
• disaster management
• social media
• web atlas
• spatial bibliography
• scoping review

Author Contributions

Initial Vision and Conceptualization: Katerina Tzavella; Writing Original Draft: Katerina Tzavella and Andriani Skopeliti; Final Form: Katerina Tzavella and Andriani Skopeliti; Methodology and Analysis: Katerina Tzavella† and Andriani Skopeliti†; Web Atlas Development and Map Design: Andriani Skopeliti; Reviewing of Drafts: Katerina Tzavella, Andriani Skopeliti, Alexander Fekete; Editing of Drafts: Katerina Tzavella and Andriani Skopeliti; Final Version: Katerina Tzavella† and Andriani Skopeliti†. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. †The authors contributed equally to this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/knowledge-syntheses/question.

2. https://www.scopus.com/home.uri.

3. https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/15100/supporthub/scopus/.

4. https://www.textrazor.com/.

5. Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL) -CRED, D. Guha-Sapir - www.emdat.be, Brussels, Belgium.

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data.

7. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021-world-risk-report.pdf.

8. https://www.directrelief.org/2019/12/10-disasters-that-changed-the-world/.

9. https://ntua-gis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=876e9083304f4f59ace29fcabbbc6cd2.

10. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021/.

11. https://www.germanwatch.org/en/cri.

12. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/.

Additional information

Funding

Part of the research has been funded by the interdisciplinary project “BigWa – Civil protection and security research in social and technological change”, funded by the NRW Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research and the MIWF-Funding Program FH-STRUKTUR 2016/08 [Grant Number 322-8.03.04.02]. The partial funding concerns only the first author Katerina Tzavella. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Notes on contributors

Katerina Tzavella

Katerina Tzavella is a postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is looking into improving crisis management and risk communication through social media and crowdsourcing for the LINKS EU project. In 2021, she obtained her PhD in Engineering (Safety Engineering) from the Bergische University of Wuppertal. Since 2011 she has been a project researcher and work package leader on EU and national-funded projects (Germany). Her research interests include applied geoinformatics, spatial analysis, crisis, emergency, and disaster management, as well as societal, emergency response, critical infrastructure, and systems of systems resilience.

Andriani Skopeliti

Andriani Skopeliti is currently an Assistant Professor at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in the School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering in Analytical Cartography and Geovisualization. She holds a Dipl. Eng. (1994) in Rural and Surveying Engineering and a PhD (2001) in Cartography, both from the National Technical University of Athens. Her main research interests focus on web cartography, cartographic generalization, VGI use in mapping and quality.

Alexander Fekete

Alexander Fekete is a full professor at TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences in Germany since 2012. He received his PhD degree in 2010 from the University of Bonn.