Publications related to Disaster

Geospatial Tools and Remote Sensing Strategies for Timely Humanitarian Response: A Case Study on Drought Monitoring in Eswatini

This article explores the escalating impact of natural disasters, particularly droughts, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), with a specific focus on Eswatini. Over the last century, approximately 63 million people in SADC countries have ...

MDPI2024

Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Sylvie Tram Nguyen

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerate ...

EPFL2023

Vision-based Flocking in Aerial Robot Swarms

Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Aerial robot swarms have the potential to perform time-critical and dangerous tasks such as disaster response without compromising human safety. However, their reliance on external infrastructure such as global positioning for localization and wireless net ...

EPFL2022

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Anthony Christopher Davison, Isolde Santos Previdelli, Paulo Vitor Da Costa Pereira

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

BRAZILIAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION2021

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Anthony Christopher Davison, Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler, Alfredo Rafael Kägi Trejo

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

2020

Barriers to the implementation of international agreements on the ground: Climate change and resilience building in the Araucanía Region of Chile

Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler

Implementing disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA/M), and sustainable development are key to increasing community resilience to pressing climate change risks. Barriers to grassroots implementation of national and int ...

2020

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler, Antonio D'Acunzi

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mi ...

2019

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Wenlong Deng

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

2019

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

Xi Chen, Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

2019

A central limit theorem for functions of stationary max-stable random fields on R-d

Erwan Fabrice Koch, Clément Dombry

Max-stable random fields are very appropriate for the statistical modelling of spatial extremes. Hence, integrals of functions of max-stable random fields over a given region can play a key role in the assessment of the risk of natural disasters, meaning t ...

ELSEVIER2019

Nonmodel-based framework for rapid seismic risk and loss assessment of instrumented steel buildings

Dimitrios Lignos, Seong-Hoon Hwang

This paper proposes a nonmodel-based framework for estimating story-based engineering demand parameters (EDPs) in instrumented steel frame buildings with steel moment-resisting frames (MRFs). The proposed framework utilizes a wavelet-based damage-sensitive ...

Elsevier2018

Preface: Special Section on Energy and Food Security in a Humanitarian Context

Silvia Hostettler

Natural disasters, population growth, social conflicts, and political or structural crises give rise to forced migrations, which can lead to humanitarian emergencies. According to the “UNHCR annual global trends report”, 65.6 million people were displaced ...

2017

Crise et gouvernance : gouvernance urbaine dans un contexte de crise: trajectoires de villes intermédiaires haïtiennes après le séisme du 12 janvier 2010

Abigaïl-Laure Sarah Irène Kern

On January 12 2010, Haiti was hit by an earthquake of 7.2 on the Richter scale. Close to 220,000 persons died, more than 300,000 were wounded and almost two other million were displaced. The earthquake¿s epicenter was actually several kilometers away the c ...

EPFL2017

Unsupervised Change Detection in Satellite Images using Oversegmentation and Mutual Information

Beril Besbinar, Bahar Taskesen

In this paper, a novel solution to the problem of unsupervised change detection in bitemporal satellite images is presented. Information measures, which are well-known and commonly-used in the change detection literature, result in unsharp change maps and ...

Ieee2017

Slash-and-burn agriculture and tropical cyclone activity in Madagascar: Implication for soil fertility dynamics and corn performance

Alexandre Buttler, Bjorn Jozef Maria Robroek, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Justine Marie Gay des Combes, Thomas Guillaume

On the western coast of Madagascar, the dry tropical forest of Kirindy may disappear in the next 50 years because of its rapid conversion into agricultural land by slash-and-burn cultivation. The slash-and-burn fields are cultivated during 3 years in avera ...

Elsevier Science Bv2017

Combining Human Computing and Machine Learning to Make Sense of Big (Aerial) Data for Disaster Response

Stéphane Joost, Devis Tuia, Matthew Josef Parkan, Carlos Castillo, Muhammad Imran, Patrick Meier, Julien Briant

Aerial imagery captured via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in disaster response. Unlike satellite imagery, aerial imagery can be captured and processed within hours rather than days. In addition, the spatial resol ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2016

Automated Damage Index Estimation of Reinforced Concrete Columns for Post-Earthquake Evaluations

The safety of buildings which have been affected by a natural disaster such as an earthquake is currently evaluated manually by certified inspectors who identify visible damage on the structural elements. This process has been proven to be time-consuming, ...

American Society of Civil Engineers2015

Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

Dario Floreano

We are witnessing the advent of a new era of robots — drones — that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments. These robots, often associated with defence applications, could have a major impact on civilian tasks, including transportation, ...

Nature Publishing Group2015