Supporting Disaster Resilience Spatial Thinking with Serious GeoGames: Project Lily Pad

The need for improvement of societal disaster resilience and response efforts was evident after the destruction caused by the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. We present a novel conceptual framework for improving disaster resilience through the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience. Our framework is implemented via Project Lily Pad, a serious geogame based on our conceptual framework, serious game case studies, interviews and real-life experiences from 2017 Hurricane Harvey survivors in Dickinson, TX, and an immersive hurricane-induced flooding scenario. The game teaches a four-fold set of skills relevant to spatial thinking and disaster resilience, including reading a map, navigating an environment, coding verbal instructions, and determining best practices in a disaster situation. Results of evaluation of the four skills via Project Lily Pad through a “think aloud” study conducted by both emergency management novices and professionals revealed that the game encouraged players to think spatially, can help build awareness for disaster response scenarios, and has potential for real-life use by emergency management professionals. It can be concluded from our results that the combination of serious games, geographic information systems (GIS), spatial thinking, and disaster resilience, as implemented via Project Lily Pad and our evaluation results, demonstrated the wide range of possibilities for using serious geogames to improve disaster resilience spatial thinking and potentially save lives when disasters occur

Review of Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World

Sustainable Thinking: Ensuring Your Library’s Future in an Uncertain World explores strategies for how public libraries can become more sustainable organizations in a time of social and environmental disruptions. Sustainability, viewed through the lens of triple bottom line accounting, can be accomplished by understanding and prioritizing the needs of the communities that libraries serve. While not written with archives in mind, the book offers important insights for archivists, who collectively must do more to prepare for climate-driven disruptions to their work

Focusing post-disaster research methodology: reflecting on 50 years of post-disaster research

The 50th anniversary of cyclone Althea at Christmastime this year, 2021, prompts a reflection of a corresponding 50 years of post-disaster research by the Centre for Disaster Studies at James Cook University. Importantly, this reflection is on what is achieved through rapid-appraisal studies immediately following a disaster. This paper builds on earlier research into the methods and types of post-disaster surveys; taking into account new technology and the emergent issue of climate change. The paper identifies general findings and issues that have been uncovered through post-disaster surveys. What is seen is a continuity of the effects of disasters across decades and across events. Thus, it is important to interview people in affected communities for debriefing and also to enhance communication, education and awareness. Survey methods across a range of disasters during the last 2 decades are reviewed to identify research and survey approaches. The methods and approaches of post-disaster surveys should be driven by community needs and characteristics and surveys must propose focused research questions and purpose to be effective and contribute to better practice

From the sky to the smartphone: Communicating weather information in a digital age

As new technology has emerged in the digital era, the public can now choose from a variety of new media from which to get weather information. Weather applications (apps) and social media have emerged as some of the popular new media. This study sought to understand the extent to which these new media are used, how weather apps are perceived, how the news media used Twitter during Hurricane Irma, and how the public engaged with the news media’s tweets. A survey and dataset of tweets were used to evaluate the research questions and hypotheses of this research. The study found that most survey participants used digital sources for weather information, even in severe weather. The weather app was the most used source of all age brackets, though held a stronger majority amongst younger demographics. Numerous relationships were found between weather app usage and gender, smartphone brand and reliance, time of app usage, and app usage frequency. Participants who downloaded a non-standard weather app onto their phone had higher self-perceived weather knowledge and interest. Weather app users perceived their app to be accurate and sometimes inconsistent, which were both found to be correlated to trust. Perceived app accuracy was also moderately correlated with other aspects of the field of meteorology. Respondents indicated that they accounted for uncertainty in a forecast with time and for regional variability of weather when determining if the forecast verified. However, both conclusions will require further research. The final study of this dissertation found that content, frequency, and engagement with news media tweets during Irma fluctuated over the storm’s duration and a relationship was found between content and engagement. Smaller television markets showed less coverage and overall change in coverage and engagement compared to larger markets. Finally, a meteorologist’s tweeting of personal content prior to the storm was found to be weakly correlated with the number of retweets received during the storm

Second opinion NuStar terminal expansion

In this report a second opinion is developed for the Environmental Impact Assessment NuStar terminal expansion (at St. Eustatius). Only the marine ecology part of the EIA report is evaluated focusing on the impacts reported for marine reserves, reef- and sea-grass habitat, conchs, turtles, marine mammal and fish. The criteria used are: completeness, consistence, transparency, ecological soundness, and relevance of the foreseen impacts resulting from the terminal expansion. When applying these criteria we have found that most of the impact assessments were incomplete (missing information and data, missing expected impacts). Reference base line data has been incompletely collected. Furthermore, many of the assessments were not transparent (based on the information given in the EIA we could not come to the same conclusion). Also we found that the reasoning to come to a conclusion in the EIA was not ecologically sound in many cases (e.g. mobile species are not affected by habitat loss because they can move out the area instead of describing an effect on the distribution area and thus on the abundance or density of the species). In a few cases assessments scored not relevant or were not assessed in a consistent way. Furthermore, we found that not all expected (potential) impacts were assessed and that those assessed were mainly qualitatively assessed only. Data on pressures was incomplete as was data on ecological receptors, and some publically available data was not used. At the end of this report we list these data needs and missing impact assessments

Robust, Resilient Networked Communication in Challenged Environments

In challenged environments, digital communication infrastructure may be difficult or even impossible to access. This is especially true in rural and developing regions, as well as in any region during a time of political or environmental crisis. We advance the state of the art in wireless networking and security to design networks and applications that rapidly assess changing networking conditions to restore communication and provide local situational awareness. This dissertation examines new systems for responding to current and emerging needs for wireless networks. This work looks across the wireless ecosystem of widely deployed standards. We develop new tools to improve network assessment and to provide robust and reliable network communication. By incorporating new technological breakthroughs, such as the wide commercial success of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), we introduce novel methods and systems for existing wireless standards for these challenged networks. We assess how existing technologies and standards function in difficult environments: lacking end-end Internet connectivity, experiencing overload or other resource constraints, and operating in three dimensional space. Through this lens, we demonstrate how to optimize networks to serve marginalized communities outside of first world urban cities and make our networks resilient to natural and political crisis that threaten communication