The role of GI-supported methods in crisis management

Abstract

Crisis and disaster management has become an important research field in GIS during recent years. Risk assessment and situation picture-related work are particularly important areas of interest. There are distinct phases in different crises; these can be roughly divided into mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper a general classification of methods in each phase is given with examples on recent or ongoing research projects. The framework is based on literature and experiences from crisis and disaster-related exercises. Three case studies are based on those exercises. The goal is to clarify the role and usability of various GI-supported methods in the crisis management process by outlining a theoretical framework and presenting examples of the developed methods. Continuously increasing amount of spatially related geographic information is a huge potential to the GI analysis and modeling methods; the concept of digital earth is the underlying mainstream that gives lots of promise to the research and development work in this field.

Keywords:

• geo-spatial science
• geoinformatics
• GIS
• digital earth
• crisis management

Acknowledgements

The Authors acknowledges the related work done by other research group members, especially Urska Demsar, Jari Korpi, Jaakko Latikka, Jaana Mäkelä Olga Špatenková, Antti Veijalainen, and Zhe Zhang.