Identifying damage caused by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake from VHR remote sensing data

The paper discusses the potential of very high resolution(VHR)satellite imagery for post-earthquake damage assessment in comparison with the role of aerial photographs.Post-disaster optical and radar satellite data are assessed for their ability to resolve collapsed buildings,destroyed transportation infrastructure,and specific land cover changes.Optical VHR imagery has shown to be effective in quantifying building stock and for assessing damage at the building level.Highresolution synthetic aperture radar(SAR)imagery requires further research to identify optimum information extraction procedures for rapid assessment of affected buildings.Based on current technical and operational capabilities increasing efforts should be devoted to the generation of spatial datasets for disaster preparedness.

First extensive and cost-effective quality check of Crisis Maps: presentation of assessment parameters and results

The digital representation of disaster situations into maps,mainly based on remotely sensed observations,is becoming a widely used instrument for emergency management.Thousands of maps are being produced all over the world and big attention is paid by international institutions,such as the World Bank,the United Nations and the European Commission to these tools.The quality of crisis maps is a crucial element to ensure effectiveness in the disaster response chain,but it is often neglected with respect to the need for a rapid delivery.In this paper a sample of crisis maps produced between 2005 and 2010 by world leader providers has been evaluated through around 40 parameters assessed by visual analysis and extracted from the validation protocol designed at the Joint Research Centre(JRC)of the European Commission.The maps turned out to be in most cases clearly readable,but some gaps and inconsistencies have been singled out,due to the lack of international standard references.The results are analysed in detail and some remarks are presented.

The Generalised Settlement Area:mapping the Earth surface in the vicinity of built-up areas

Geo-information on settlements from Earth Observation offers a base for objective and scalable monitoring of the evolution of cities and settlements,including their location,extent and other attributes.In this work,we deploy the best available global knowledge on the presence of human settlements and built-up structures derived from Earth Observation to advance the understanding of the human presence on Earth.We start from a concept of Generalised Settlement Area to identify the Earth surface within which any built-up structure is present.We further characterise the resulted map by using an agreement map among the state of the art of remote sensing products mapping built-up areas or other strictly related semantic abstractions as urban areas or artificial surfaces.The agreement map is formed by a grid of 1 km2,where each cell is classified according to the number of EO-derived products reporting any positive occurrence of the abstractions related to the presence of built-up structures.The paper describes the characteristics of the Generalised Settlement Area,the differences in the agreement map across geographic regions of the world,and outlines the implications for potential users of the EO-derived products used in this study.