In the past few years the United States has experienced a series of disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which have severely taxed and in many cases overwhelmed responding agencies. In all aspects of emergency management, geospatial data and tools have the potential to help save lives, limit damage, and reduce the costs of dealing with emergencies. Great strides have been made in the past four decades in the development of geospatial data and tools that describe locations of objects on the Earth's surface and make it possible for anyone with access to the Internet to witness the magnitude of a disaster. However, the effectiveness of any technology is as much about the human systems in which it is embedded as about the technology itself. Successful Response Starts with a Map assesses the status of the use of geospatial data, tools, and infrastructure in disaster management, and recommends ways to increase and improve their use. This book explores emergency planning and response; how geospatial data and tools are currently being used in this field; the current policies that govern their use; various issues related to data accessibility and security; training; and funding. Successful Response Starts with a Map recommends significant investments be made in training of personnel, coordination among agencies, sharing of data and tools, planning and preparedness, and the tools themselves.

Disaster management is generally understood to consist of four phases: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. While these phases are all important and interrelated, response and recovery are often considered to be the most critical in terms of saving lives. Response is the acute phase occurring after the event, and includes all arrangemen

Geo-information technology can be of considerable use in disaster management, but with considerable challenge in integrating systems, interoperability and reliability. This book provides a broad overview of geo-information technology, software, systems needed, currently used and to be developed for disaster management. The text invites discussion on systems and requirements for use of geo-information under time and stress constraints and unfamiliar situations, environments and circumstances.

Lessons learned in the last several years have given clear indications that the prediction and efficient monitoring of disasters is one of the critical factors in decision-making process. In this respect space-based technologies have the great potential of supplying information in near real time. Earth observation satellites have already demonstrated their flexibility in providing data to a wide range of applications: weather forecasting, person and vehicle tracking, alerting to disaster, forest fire and flood monitoring, oil spills, spread of desertification, monitoring of crop and forestry damages. This book focuses on a wider utilisation of remote sensing in disaster management. The discussed aspects comprise data access/delivery to the users, information extraction and analysis, management of data and its integration with other data sources (airborne and terrestrial imagery, GIS data, etc.), data standardization, organisational and legal aspects of sharing remote sensing information.

This book is designed to help students and researchers understand the latest research and development trends in the domain of geospatial information and communication (GeoICT) technologies. Accordingly, it covers the fundamentals of geospatial information systems, spatial positioning technologies, and networking and mobile communications, with a focus on OGC and OGC standards, Internet GIS, and location-based services. Particular emphasis is placed on introducing GeoICT as an integrated technology that effectively bridges various information-technology domains.

This book is the second in a series that examines how geographic information te- nologies (GIT) are being implemented to improve our understanding of a variety of hazard and disaster situations. The main types of technologies covered under the umbrella of GIT, as used in this volume, are geographic information systems, remote sensing (not including ground-penetrating or underwater systems), and global po- tioning systems. Our focus is on urban areas, broadly de ned in order to encompass rapidly growing and densely populated areas that may not be considered “urban” in the conventional sense. The material presented here is also unabashedly applied – our goal is to provide GIT tools to those seeking more ef cient ways to respond to, recover from, mitigate, prevent, and/or model hazard and disaster events in urban settings. Therefore, this book was created not only with our colleagues in the academic world in mind, but also for hazards professionals and practitioners. We also believe graduate students will nd the material presented here of interest, as may upper division undergraduate students.

Effective utilization of satellite positioning, remote sensing, and GIS in disaster monitoring and management requires research and development in numerous areas, including data collection, information extraction and analysis, data standardization, organizational and legal aspects of sharing of remote sensing information. This book provides a solid overview of what is being developed in the risk prevention and disaster management sector.