Enhancing satellite-based emergency mapping: Identifying wildfires through geo-social media analysis

When a disaster emerges, timely acquisition of information is crucial for a rapid situation assessment. Although automation in the standard satellite-based emergency mapping workflow has been advanced, delays still occur at crucial steps. In order to speed up the provision of satellite-based crisis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sebastian Schmidt, Monika Friedemann, David Hanny, Bernd Resch, Torsten Riedlinger, Martin Mühlbauer
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2025-01-01
Series:Big Earth Data
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Online Access:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/20964471.2025.2454526
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Summary:When a disaster emerges, timely acquisition of information is crucial for a rapid situation assessment. Although automation in the standard satellite-based emergency mapping workflow has been advanced, delays still occur at crucial steps. In order to speed up the provision of satellite-based crisis products to emergency managers, this paper proposes a geo-social media-based approach that detects disaster events based on the spatio-temporal analysis of georeferenced, disaster-related Tweets. The proposed methodology is validated on the basis of two use cases: wildfires in Chile and British Columbia. The results show the general ability of Twitter to forecast events several days in advance, at least for the Chile use case. However, there are large spatial differences, as there is a correlation between population density and the reliability of Twitter data. Consequently, only few meaningful alerts could be generated for British Columbia, an area with very low population numbers.
ISSN:2096-4471
2574-5417