A cyberinfrastructure for community resilience assessment and visualization

Disaster resilience is a major societal challenge. Cartography and GIS can contribute substantially to this research area. This paper describes a cyberinfrastructure for disaster resilience assessment and visualization for all counties in the United States. Aided by the Application Programming Interface-enabled web mapping and component-oriented web tools, the cyberinfrastructure is designed to better serve the US communities with comprehensive resilience information. The resilience assessment tool is based on the resilience inference measurement model. This web application delivers the resilience assessment tool to the users through applets. It provides an interactive tool for the users to visualize the historical natural hazards exposure and damages in the areas of their interest, compute the resilience indices, and produce on-the-fly maps and statistics. The app could serve as a useful tool for decision makers. This app won the top 10 runners-up in the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Climate Resilience App Challenge 2014 and the top 5 in the scientific section of the ESRI Global Disaster App Challenge 2014.

[1]  S. Carpenter,et al.  Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters , 2005, Science.

[2]  W. Platt,et al.  Tree population responses to hurricane disturbance: syndromes in a south-eastern USA old-growth forest , 2003 .

[3]  Coleen Vogel,et al.  Foreword: Resilience, vulnerability and adaptation: A cross-cutting theme of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change , 2006 .

[4]  Helbert Arenas,et al.  Assessment of vulnerability and adaptive capacity to coastal hazards in the Caribbean Region , 2014 .

[5]  Shaowen Wang,et al.  CyberGIS: blueprint for integrated and scalable geospatial software ecosystems , 2013, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[6]  Wei Liang,et al.  A Two-level Agent-Based Model for Hurricane Evacuation in New Orleans , 2015 .

[7]  M. Zoback,et al.  Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative , 2013 .

[8]  D. Sheridan,et al.  Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards , 2010 .

[9]  N. Lam,et al.  Measuring Community Resilience to Coastal Hazards along the Northern Gulf of Mexico. , 2016, Natural hazards review.

[10]  C. M. Croner,et al.  Public Health GIS and the Internet , 2003, Annual review of public health.

[11]  Hiromichi Fukui,et al.  Development and application of a livable environment evaluation support system using Web GIS , 2004, J. Geogr. Syst..

[12]  S. Cutter,et al.  Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baseline Conditions , 2011 .

[13]  Kenan Li,et al.  Temporal changes of coastal community resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region , 2011 .

[14]  Jianya Gong,et al.  A virtual globe-based 3D visualization and interactive framework for public participation in urban planning processes , 2010, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[15]  Shaowen Wang.  A CyberGIS Framework for the Synthesis of Cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and Spatial Analysis , 2010 .