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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Crowdsourcing
• Disaster
• Forest fire
• Geosocial data mining, citizen science