The horrific scenes rising from the Feb. 6 earthquake that ravaged components of Turkey and Syria left tens of millions worldwide feeling powerless to assist. Other than donating to a aid fund, what doable help might be offered from hundreds of miles away?

On Monday night time, 30 Clark University college students gathered within the Jefferson GIS lab to reply that query.

The college students staged a mapathon, utilizing GIS (geographic data methods) expertise to transform satellite tv for pc imagery into maps displaying the situation of roads, buildings, bridges, and different options within the earthquake-impacted areas to assist aid organizations of their search-and-recovery efforts.

The mapathon was organized by Claudia Buszta and André de Oliveira Domingues, who’re grasp’s college students within the GIS program coordinated by the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment and the Graduate School of Geography. The departments co-sponsored the occasion, offering funding for the night’s meals.

Monday’s mapathon turnout represented a mixture of undergraduate, grasp’s, and doctoral college students from numerous majors. No earlier GIS expertise was wanted to do the mapping: de Oliveira Domingues and Buszta circulated among the many contributors to supply technical help, equivalent to serving to to establish the buildings that present up as shadows and shapes within the satellite tv for pc photos.

“It was encouraging to see how enthusiastic people were about this project,” de Oliveira Domingues mentioned. “The terrifying news of yet another strong earthquake hitting the same region [on Feb. 20] reinforced for us the importance of contributing to the response effort.”

Geography Professor John Rogan famous in an interview simply previous to the occasion that the mapping response is being coordinated worldwide by way of Humanitarian Open Street Maps, an ongoing undertaking to make digitized, high-resolution maps — much like these you’d discover on Google Earth — accessible for public use, together with by aid businesses, from the Red Cross to the United Nations. He mentioned it’s priceless for these responding to the Turkey/Syria websites to have data on what roads and buildings exist within the affected areas (a few of these buildings could have been fragmented or collapsed) as they assess the situations on the bottom and plot their disaster-response methods.

According to de Oliveira Domingues, Clark college students discovered in regards to the want for crowd-sourced mapping help from Corey Dickinson ’15, who’s a advisor with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Ankara, Turkey.

“Andre put out a message in a group chat that there was mapping online if people wanted to spread the word about it, and I suggested maybe we should put together a mapathon to bring in more people,” Buszta recalled.

She mentioned the mapathon contributors seemed for specific options within the satellite tv for pc pictures, equivalent to clusters of squares which may be recognized as a neighborhood and main roadways that can be utilized for emergency companies autos. When that they had accomplished a sure map section, the scholars then uploaded the data, which was analyzed and verified by mappers working with one of many coordinating teams.

De Oliveira Domingues in contrast the student-produced maps to what one would possibly discover on Google Maps. “Essentially, we’re taking the satellite view of an area and making it the street view,” he mentioned. “We’re drawing lines where the roads are, and polygons or squares for buildings, to make it easier for people to search and find locations. A lot of the areas we deal with are undermapped for any number of reasons — maybe because they’re rural regions or have been under conflict.”

At the time of this writing, de Oliveira Domingues and Buszta didn’t have the arduous information of how a lot territory had been mapped on Monday night time, however Rogan expects that the coed workforce “created hundreds if not more data points” that will likely be key to aid and restoration efforts now and deep into the longer term.

“The geographic scope of these events is so enormous that it’s tough to keep up with, but if important information is generated it will be used by the U.N., by the Red Cross, Red Crescent, and others as they move forward,” he mentioned. “It’s truthful to say that the Clark students’ work will go directly to help plan for the next weeks, months, and perhaps years. This is a really cool thing.”

The mapathon could even have opened the door to related efforts sooner or later.

“We were blown away by the turnout, and it was so encouraging to see our community come together and support an important cause,” Buszta mentioned. “Many of the students that I talked to said that they are likely to participate in more online projects on their own, now that they know how to use the platform.”