Achievement

A team of UB graduate students, directed by Chris Renschler (IGERT faculty), assessed damage from the January 2010 Haiti Earthquake, using their skills in GIS and Remote Sensing. The team included IGERT Trainee Amy Frazier and IGERT affiliate Sue Roussie. More than 500 researchers from around the world donated their time to a rapid assessment of the impact of the earthquake, establishing which buildings had collapsed or had been heavily damaged. This distributed mapping effort was coordinated by the Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network Community and was based on latest available pre-event and post-event very-high resolution aerial imagery of the earthquake area, delivered through Google Earth. The project was supported by the World Bank and by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. Findings were published by the World Bank and are being used to support reconstruction programs of various organizations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmoUTj5knQ