Natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, droughts, landslides and others occur frequently in most parts of our world. Therefore, many activities are being carried out to improve especially the Early Warning (EW) for disasters, but also all other phases of Disaster Management (DM) such as preparedness, awareness, response, recovery and mitigation.
Nowadays, there is a general awareness that geographic information and related technologies are playing an important role in all these phases.
Early Warning is obviously a central point within the whole chain, as proper warning systems can save lives and can protect people, infrastructures and other facilities. Proper Early Warning systems are pretty much dependent on the kind of the disaster, although there are technologies such as sensor networks which play a common role. Related issues within EW are for example sensor technologies, the combination of different sensors, fusion of data from different sensors, organisation of sensor networks but also numerical models and simulations. Therefore in many research projects a specific focus is placed on improving the methodology of Early Warning. But, as already mentioned, other aspects of DM are also important research issues, which is impressively shown in the papers of this and the following issue of this journal.
EW and DM are also processing oriented activities. Information and data coming from various sources are permanently handled, identified, interpreted, and visualized, so that responsible persons or institutions can recognize which kind of dangerous situations can or could occur. Disaster Management starts with the information of imminent dangerous phenomena (id. to EW) or situation, continues with the management of all active processes, helping to solve situations, caring about people, properties, nature, etc. and finishes when the last person or group of people are outside of the dangerous locations. Activities connected with decision making and needs of users in EW and DM situations are of specific interest, but are different, and it is an ambition to visualize running processes in real time, by various tools and according to the requests of users, including decision makers and inhabitants. Also the crowd sourcing concept plays a major role in this context.
It is not possible to give a complete overview on all aspects of EW and DM in this introduction but it should be mentioned that the challenges in these fields are manifold and need cooperation, integration of the methods and approaches developed by different scientific disciplines, including natural, social, environmental and other ones.
EW and DM are treated in many ways on a worldwide, regional (e.g. EU and China), national and sub-national level, in policies in action plans, directives, etc. and also in research and development projects. For example in the EU Sixth Framework Program (FP6) three calls in 2003, 2005 and 2006 aimed for: in-situ monitoring and smart sensor networks, risk information infrastructure and generic services, public safety communication, alert systems and rapidly deployable emergency telecommunications systems, emergency management and rescue operations, distributed tsunami early warning and alert system (Europe & Indian Ocean), etc.
In the EU, problems of EW and DM are connected with the Safety and security agenda in the 7th Framework Program as a part of the research agenda on Space (7FP). The expected Activities in the Space-based applications at the service of the European Society are based on development projects and realization of directives such as GMES, INSPIRE, SEIS and several others.
Perhaps one of the best examples of a political and policy approach is the Chinese document approved on May 11 by the Chinese Cabinet, just one year after the catastrophic Wenchuan earthquake. The document, entitled “China′s Actions for Disaster Prevention and Reduction” used much international knowledge and experiences from many UN organizations as well as from the USA, Europe and other continents. Amongst others, the document also describes Strategic goals and tasks for disaster reduction such as: to build a relatively complete working system and operational mechanisms regarding disaster reduction; to greatly enhance the capabilities related to disaster monitoring and early warning, prevention and preparation, emergency handling, disaster relief, and rehabilitation and reconstruction; to notably raise public awareness of disaster reduction and emergency rescue skills; and to significantly reduce human casualties and direct economic losses caused by natural disasters.
For EW and DM, Digital Earth (DE) is very important. DE is a powerful metaphor for the organisation and access to digital information through a multi-scale, three-dimensional representation of the globe as needed for EW and DM. Globally, DE is developing at different speeds in different parts of the World, and with different priorities for its various components (e.g. in Europe and particularly in the EU it is considered as a new idea, with a focus on methodology, integration of technologies and strong participation of people). DE has a global dimension, including multiple applications and themes. It has had strong political backing since the beginning. DE has a strong technological component and provides a flexible framework to adapt to evolving technologies.
The authors of this introduction have been involved in quite a number of projects related to EW and DM, and especially the first Co-editor has organised numerous conferences and seminars related to the topic. For example, in cooperation with the China National School of Administration, Embassy of the Czech Republic in Beijing which held the rotating Presidency of the EU and the Delegation of the European Commission in Beijing, the “China-EU Early Warning and Emergency Management Seminar –Challenges, Best Practices and Perspectives” was held at the Chinese National School of Administration (CNSA) premises in Beijing from 13 – 14 May 2009. The Seminar confirmed that China has numerous large catastrophes with a scale progressively larger than those in Europe and with many tragic consequences. Other countries can find much vital scientific knowledge in China on this topic. On the other hand, Europe and other developed countries of the World have plenty of knowledge, experience and developed models of disaster reduction of hazard situations based on work with individual inhabitants at the personal level, with help of the newest information (e.g. GMES, INSPIRE, SEIS) and communication technologies using ideas of e-governance and e-government, other digital initiatives, existence of services for crises situations, etc. Another important outcome of the seminar was the recommendation to intensify international cooperation in the field.
Also relevant for this specific issue is the pre-conference Workshop “GI@EarlyWarning” of AGILE 2009, held in June in Hannover, which was organised by Martin Breunig and Wolfgang Reinhardt and the Joint Symposium of International Cartographic Association-ICA Working Group on Cartography in Early Warning and Crises Management (CEWaCM) and JBGIS Geo-information for Disaster Management (Gi4DM) entitled “Cartography and Geoinformatics for Early Warning and Emergency Management: Towards Better Solutions” organized in January 2009 in Prague by Milan Konečný. In addition, a series of seminars/workshops devoted to EW and DM have been held as part of the biannual Cartography and GIS conferences organized by T. Bandrova and M. Konečný in Bulgaria and the annual EW and DM seminars held as part of the Geo-Siberia Trade Fair and Conference in Novosibirsk organized by Vladimír Lisickij and Milan Konečný in Novosibirsk. The same tradition has been developed as part of the AutoCarto conferences in North America.
This Special Issue A is part of a double issue (the Special Issue B will be published in the next issue of this journal) and contains six papers:
Guo Huadong provides a comprehensive description and potential of Earth observations in disaster mitigation, and real and quasi-real-time monitoring and assessment using advanced optical and microwave earth observation capacities, while digital earth technologies provide a very important role in rapidly acquiring spatial information of the disaster areas. His paper“Understanding global natural disasters and the role of earth observation” concentrates on the characteristics of the three main global natural disasters-earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods from a scientific point of view, and analyses their patterns of distribution, origin and result, as well as the extent of their damage and measures of disaster mitigation and prevention.
Michael F. Goodchild and J. Alan Glennon′s paper on: ,,Crowdsourcing geographic information for disaster response: a research frontier” touches one of the rapid growth areas of Geographic Information created by amateur citizens, also known as volunteered geographic information. Recently, this has started to provide an interesting alternative to traditional authoritative information from mapping agencies and corporations. Data quality is a major concern of such volunteered geographic information, an aspect which the authors discuss extensively and in considerable detail. At the end of their paper, a real example of four wildfires that impacted the Santa Barbara area in 2007-200 is discussed, together with lessons learnt..
Bertrand De Longueville et al. in their paper “Digital Earth's Nervous System for crisis events: real-time Sensor Web Enablement of Volunteered Geographic Information” gives a unique approach of new realization of the DE idea. They see progress in further integration of the temporal and voluntary dimension which is needed to better portray the event-based nature of our world. The authors aim to extend the DE vision with a Nervous System in order to provide decision makers with improved alerting mechanisms: the volunteered geographic information (VGI). Although workflows have been implemented to create, validate and distribute VGI datasets for various thematic domains, its exploitation in real time and its integration into existing concepts of DE, such as spatial data infrastructures, still needs to be further addressed. The authors propose to solve the problem through Sensor Web Enablement for VGI, where VGI sensing becomes a sense of the DE's nervous system. The approach is discussed in the context of a forest fire scenario.
The paper “Challenges of the Sensor Web for disaster management” from Fei Wang and Hongyong Yuan addresses another very important issue. The role of the sensor web for disaster management has been investigated widely but the vulnerability of a sensor web in case of severe weather conditions, damaged infrastructures, fires, etc. have often been neglected. This may cause the Sensor Web to be out-of-service. The paper discusses these challenges and possible solutions.
Stefan Bernsdorf et al. describe a mobile volcano fast response system (VFRS) that can be used for volcano monitoring in case of volcanic unrest anywhere in the world, which is currently under development in Germany under the Program “Geotechnologien”. The main focus of this paper is an overview on the common web GIS interface which allows users access to the system and serves as a decision support system to assist scientists and local authorities in deciding how to react in the case of volcanic unrest.
Doris Dransch et al. discuss “The contribution of maps to the challenges of risk communication to the public” which addresses the central topic of how to improve public risk awareness and mitigation. Because of the strong spatio-temporal component of natural hazards, maps can obviously play a decisive role in communicating risk information, which is convincingly shown in the paper.
The Guest Editors believe that all the papers selected for Special Issue A (and also for those forthcoming in Special Issue B) show many important aspects of all the complex processes which should be integrated, in order to act as powerful processes, flexible, smart, intelligent, understandable and user friendly tools for EW and DM solutions.