The role of crowdsourcing and social media in crisis mapping: a case study of a wildfire reaching Croatian City of Split

Abstract

As climate change continues, wildfire outbreaks are becoming more frequent and more difficult to control. In mid-July 2017, a forest fire spread from the forests to the city of Split in Croatia. This unpredictable spread nearly caused emergency systems to collapse. Fortunately, a major tragedy was avoided due to the composure of the responsible services and the help of citizens. Citizens helped to extinguish the fire and provided a large amount of disaster-related information on various social media platforms in a timely manner. In this paper, we addressed the problem of identifying useful Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and georeferenced social media crowdsourcing data to improve situational awareness during the forest fire in the city of Split. In addition, social media data were combined with other external data sources (e.g., Sentinel-2 satellite imagery) and authoritative data to establish geographic relationships between wildfire phenomena and social media messages. This article highlights the importance of using georeferenced social media data and provides a different perspective for disaster management by filling gaps in authoritative data. Analyses from the presented reconstruction of events from multiple sources impact a better understanding of these types of events, knowledge sharing, and insights into crowdsourcing processes that can be incorporated into disaster management.

Exhaustive Insights Towards Social-Media Driven Disaster Management Approaches

“… There are various other associated conventional schemes towards analysis the severity of the disaster management. Citizen reporting and crowdsourcing is another mechanism that uses user-generated content and crowdsourced maps that allow users to share multimedia-based information in real time and contribute to navigation and resource allocation [65].…”

“…Several dominant research-based approaches are used to analyze natural disasters viz. i) Interdisciplinary Research (Tavra et al [65], Khattar & Quadri [60], Ide & Nomura [58]), ii) Risk-Based Approaches ((Psaroudakis et al [30]), iii) Datadriven Analysis (Ghawana et al [38], Vavassori et al [52], Zhang et al [45]), iv) Resilience Frameworks (Maxant et al [51], Divjak and Lapaine [47], Du et al [49]). Under interdisciplinary research scheme, it is considered that natural disasters are complex events involving multiple factors, including physical, social, economic, and environmental dimensions.…”

Social media insights on public perception and sentiment during and after disasters: The European floods in 2021 as a case study

“…(2) Establishing a two‐way communication channel between disaster agencies and the general public. The aim is to establish a missing link between the public posting their opinions via social media and the agencies as well as decision‐makers (Alamsyah et al, 2018; Neppalli et al, 2017; Reuter & Kaufhold, 2018; Tavra et al, 2021). (3) Providing support for post‐disaster management.…”

Social Response and Disaster Management: Insights from Twitter Data Assimilation on Hurricane Ian

“…Exploring the role of social media analytics in long-term recovery and community resilience is an important avenue for future research. Understanding how social media data can support post-disaster recovery planning, resource allocation, and community engagement can contribute to more effective and sustainable recovery efforts [134], [135].…”