Christoph Aubrecht

European Space Agency | ESA · Directorate of Earth Observation Programmes

This study promotes the idea of future-oriented thinking in disaster risk management and describes how forward-looking activities can play a role in reduction of future risks and impacts. It explicitly highlights how a common future-oriented proactive attitude built-up in participative stakeholder communication networks can assist in shaping and cr...

The increase in the number and severity of weather extremes (including excessive heat) potentially associated with climate change has highlighted the needs for research into risk assessment and risk reduction measures. Extreme heat events, the focus of this paper, have been consistently reported as the leading cause of weather-related mortality in...

Disaster risk is not fully characterized without taking into account vulnerability and population exposure. Assessment of earthquake risk in urban areas would benefit from considering the variation of population distribution at more detailed spatial and temporal scales, and from a more explicit integration of this improved demographic data with exi...

Integrative analysis of remote sensing data and socioeconomic information enables the transition of land cover and urban structures into a detailed functional model of urban land use. In this paper object based image analysis is used to derive a classification of urban structures. The implementation of ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) significantly en...

In the context of disaster risk management and in particular for improving preparedness and mitigation of potential impacts, information on socioeconomic characteristics including aspects of situation-specific human exposure and vulnerability is considered vital. This paper provides an overview on available multi-level geospatial information and mo...

In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes in human populations and land use/land cover to shed light on issues of sustainability, human livelihoods, and conservation, and led to practical innovations in agricultural planning,...

Traditional land use and land cover (LULC) mapping has long relied strongly on input from Earth Observation (EO) data sources at various resolutions and scale levels. With high performance and cloud computing on the rise, rapid processing of large volumes of very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery—big EO data—is becoming less problematic. Cons...

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we ac...

The main motivation of this paper is to shed new light on the problem of spatial identification of urban and rural areas globally, and to provide a compatible disaggregation framework for linking associated country-specific, non-spatial data compilations, such as building type inventories. Existing homogeneously set-up global urban extent models co...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12242/full This is the editorial associated with a special issue in TGIS on 'Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Advancing Science'. All papers are available already in 'early view', the compiled volume will be published in print in early 2017.

The concept of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has progressed from being an exotic prospect to making a profound impact on GIScience and geography in general, as initially anticipated. However, while massive and manifold data is continuously produced voluntarily and applications are built for information and knowledge extraction, the initi...

This paper introduces a novel top-down approach to geospatially identify and distinguish areas of mixed use from predominantly residential areas within urban agglomerations. Under the framework of theWorld Bank's Central American Country Disaster Risk Profiles (CDRP) initiative, a disaggregated property stock exposure model has been developed as on...

In this paper we discuss the use of volunteered geo-dynamic information (VGDI) for assessing exposure to health risks and improving analysis of associated dynamic aspects in urban settings. VGDI is introduced as an alternative and complementary data source to traditional geodata whereby both spatial and temporal aspects are highlighted. Within the...

In northern regions, society can be seriously interrupted by a prolonged electricity network blackout due to a winter storm that cuts off power, communication and road networks. Due to hard winter weather it is essential to enhance the resilience of society to avoid danger to life. This can be achieved by developing new models to enhance preparedne...

“CRISMA - Modelling crisis management for improved action and preparedness”, a collaborative research and development project co-funded by the European Community (2011-2015) developed a generic framework for implementation of simulation-based decision support systems in different domains of the natural or industrial risk (floods, snowstorms, earthq...

This paper introduces a novel geospatial identification approach to distinguish areas of mixed use from predominantly residential areas within urban agglomerations. Carried out within the framework of the World Bank’s Country Disaster Risk Profiles (CDRP) project initiative - currently being implemented in Central America - global applicability and...

Increasing human and monetary losses resulting from extreme natural events over the past decades have been documented in corresponding disaster data compilations such as the open-access EM-DAT, SHELDUS, and DesInventar or the private domain NatCatSERVICE (Munich Re) and Sigma (Swiss Re) databases. One of the most imminent questions in disaster risk...

Natural or man-made disasters can trigger other negative events leading to tremendous increase of fatalities and damages. In case of Low Probability-High consequences events, decision makers are faced with very difficult choices and the availability of a tool to support emergency decisions would be very much beneficial. Within EU CRISMA project a c...

Wo steht die urbane Fernerkundung heute? Ist sie bereits ein integraler Teil einer neuen, multidisziplinären urbanen Geographie? Wie muss es in der Mitte des zweiten Jahrzehnts des 21. Jahrhunderts mit der urbanen Fernerkundung weitergehen? Reicht es aus, immer neuere und bessere Satelliten und Sensoren zu bauen oder brauchen wir ein anderes Verstä...

CRISMA Catalogue provides the most accurate and up-to-date information on all CRISMA Applications, Building Block, Models and Components which have been specified, implemented or inherited from previous projects. Thanks to the way relations between reference applications, BB specifications and Components are presented on the site, it is easy to nav...

A crisis situation may be due to the occurrence of a single hazard event with large impacts or due to several hazard events occurring simultaneously. Hazard events occurring at the same time may have independent causes or may result from a sequence of triggering effects. The outcome of a situation for which an adverse event triggers one or more seq...

In this paper an integrated approach of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Sci-ence followed by three-dimensional landscape visualization is presented. The primary ob-jective of this project was to simulate future scenarios and to communicate geo-relevant issues in a context-oriented and user-friendly way. To be able to visualize change two...

Kurzfassung In dieser Arbeit wird ein hochauflösendes Satellitenbild (IKONOS 2) gemeinsam mit La-ser-Scanning-Daten objekt-orientiert analysiert und klassifiziert. Aus dem manuell nachbe-arbeiteten Ergebnis werden die Gebäude herausgefiltert und mittels eines neu entwickelten Algorithmus halb-automatisch generalisiert. Die resultierenden Objekte di...

http://www.crismaproject.eu/deliverables/CRISMA_D432_public_print.pdf

Extreme winter storms in northern regions bring heavy snowfall, strong winds and cold weather. Winter storms accumulate snow on power lines, causing damage, power outages and communication breakdowns. They may disrupt society’s normal interactions, especially in sparsely populated areas, due to snow-blocked roads, isolating people and preventing re...

The severity of the 2012 fire season in Europe was well above the average of the last 20 years, according to records of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) (JRC, 2013). At least for parts of the Mediterranean region, that situation seems to have become even worse in 2013. Particularly in Portugal, the 2013 fire season will be rememb...

Tsunamis are among the most destructive and lethal of coastal hazards. These are time-specific events, and despite directly affecting a narrow strip of coastline, a single occurrence can have devastating effects and cause massive loss of life, especially in urbanized coastal areas. In this work, in order to consider the time dependence of populatio...

For assessing the social dimension of vulnerability, population exposure mapping is usually considered the essential starting point. Integration of social structure then further differentiates situation-specific vulnerability patterns on a local scale. Census data available in heterogeneous spatial reference units are still considered the standard...

The assessment of regional climate change impacts combined with the sensitivity of landscape functions by predictive modelling of hazardous landscape processes is a new fundamental field of research. In particular, this study investigates the effects of changing weather extremes on meso-regional-scale landscape vulnerability. Climatic-exposure para...

The observed changing in the nature of climate related events and the increase in the number and severity of extreme weather events has been changing risk patterns and puts more people at risk. In recent years extreme heat events caused excess mortality and public concerns in many regions of the world (e.g., 2003 and 2006 Western European heat wave...

In this abstract we illustrate the various temporal aspects to be considered in a multi-hazard crisis scenario set up as pilot study in the EU-FP7 Integrated Project CRISMA. In the framework of CRISMA a simulation-based decision support system for crisis management is developed facilitating the modeling of realistic crisis scenarios, related pre-ev...

Many physical, chemical and biological processes taking place at the land surface are strongly influenced by the amount of water stored within the upper soil layers. Therefore, many scientific disciplines require soil moisture observations for developing, evaluating and improving their models. One of these disciplines is meteorology where soil mois...

This report is the output of the first step of the review of models for multi-sectorial consequences dealed with CRISMA Project. It aims at defining and then providing the necessary models for the assessment and management of hazard, vulnerability and losses, and capacities. The framework for multi-risk assessment and management is one objective de...

The edited book volume 'Land Use: Planning, Regulations, and Environment' is a diverse compilation of ten chapters covering different facets of the field of land use research with a particular focus on planning aspects. The contributions were selected by the guest editors after passing a thorough peer review process involving selected international...

Landbedeckung- und Landnutzungsdaten (LB/LN) stellen eine wesentliche Informationsgrundlage für die Erfüllung zahlreicher öffentlich-rechtlicher Aufgaben dar. Um diesen Anforderungen gerecht zu werden, wurde im Rahmen der Aktionslinie GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) des Österreichischen Weltraumprogramms das Projekt LISA (Land...

In diesem Artikel wird der Einsatz von Satelliten-basierten Bodenfeuchtedaten für ausgewählte Anwendungen im Risikomanagement diskutiert. Die Analyse potentieller Einwirkungen von Naturgefahren auf soziale Systeme und deren Vulnerabilität wird als essentieller Faktor für Risikoabschätzungen dargestellt. Zwei Fallstudien zur Analyse von Ereignissen...

Tsunamis are a major risk for Lisbon (Portugal) coastal areas whose impacts can be extremely high, as confirmed by the past occurrence of major events. For correct risk assessment and awareness and for implementing mitigation measures, detailed simulation of exposure and evacuation is essential. This work uses a spatial modeling approach for estima...

Vulnerability describing the status of a society with respect to an imposed hazard or potential impact is considered a strongly multidisciplinary concept. A central objective of vulnerability assessment is to provide indications where and how people – and more specifically, what kind of people – might be affected by a certain impact. For assessment...

Crisis and disaster management is much more than the immediate first-response actions following an incident. In many projects the main focus has been on the phase starting at the point when an unwanted event happens and lasting until the activities return to normal routines (i.e., ad hoc reaction rather than proactive mitigation). There has been le...

This paper focuses on temporal aspects of disaster risk management, including mapping short-term and long-term variability in spatio-temporal vulnerability patterns. Various concepts considering the temporal component of vulnerability are illustrated on the basis of case study applications, including modeling population exposure to earthquake hazar...

In the context of disaster risk management and in particular for exposure and impact assessments modeling, input data quality, both in terms of the degree of spatial and thematic accuracy and reliability, is one of the most important factors. Especially in an urban setting, mapping and analysis of population exposure is crucial for the assessment o...

Folgen der explosiven Expansion der menschlichen Zivilisation sind unter anderem der weltweite Verlust der biologischen Vielfalt und schwerwiegende Änderungen an den lebenserhaltenden geophysikalischen Prozessen auf der Erde. Der „Fußabdruck“ der menschlichen Besiedlung ist eindeutig vom Weltraum aus erkennbar in Form von künstlichem Licht bei Nach...

Folgen der explosiven Expansion der menschlichen Zivilisation sind unter anderem der weltweite Verlust der biologischen Vielfalt und schwerwiegende Änderungen an den lebenserhaltenden geophysikalischen Prozessen auf der Erde. Der „Fußabdruck“ der menschlichen Besiedlung ist eindeutig vom Weltraum aus erkennbar in Form von künstlichem Licht bei Nach...

In recent years we have observed an incredible increase in location-specific information provided voluntarily by individuals and disseminated via the internet. The emergence of this Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) as Goodchild first described it in 2007 [1] has attracted considerable interest within the GIScience research community. As a s...

This study employs a dasymetric mapping approach for modeling and mapping of the spatio-temporal distribution of population at high resolution in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal, and concerns its use for territorial planning. The objective is to introduce nighttime and daytime population densities and to demonstrate the usefulness and import...

In the present work we model and map the spatio-temporal distribution of population in the daily cycle and analyze it with a tsunami hazard map to better assess tsunami risk in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Results show that a significant amount of population is potentially at risk, and its numbers increase dramatically from nighttime to daytime, e...

Increasing land consumption and land demand particularly in mountainous regions entail further expansion of settlements to known hazard-prone areas. Potential impacts as well as regionally defined levels of 'acceptable risk' are often not transparently communicated and residual risks are not perceived by the public. Analysing past events and assess...

Since satellite remote sensing of fires started in the 1970s, fire monitoring has become increasingly important, particularly in the context of mitigating social impacts. Light from fires can be identified in nighttime satellite imagery featuring the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A procedure for detection of fire lights and near rea...

For assessment of the social dimension of vulnerability, population exposure mapping forms an important part and is usually considered the starting point. Integration of social structure would then further differentiate situation-specific vulnerability patterns on a local scale. Census data available in inhomogeneous spatial reference units are sti...

This paper proposes an experimental methodology toward describing and quantifying coral reef bleaching using very high spatial resolution optical satellite imagery. Sea surface temperature-based bleaching alerts issued by NOAA's Coral Reef Watch triggered image acquisition and served as an indication for high bleaching probability. Images of suspec...

EU-wide environmental initiatives such as GMES, INSPIRE, and SEIS are rapidly improving the capabilities of environmental information systems. At the same time, these initiatives influence the accompanying legal framework as well as the stakeholders’ attitude in a direction that simplifies the use of environmental information in crisis management....

This discussion paper focuses on conceptualizing the ultimate goal in disaster management, i.e. reduction of future risks and impacts and explicitly highlights how actions taken in various phases of integrated disaster risk management influence vulnerability and eventually overall risk characteristics. First, the advancement of the disaster managem...

The coastal region of Lisbon, Portugal, is potentially subject to tsunami hazard. Mapping and assessing tsunami risk requires giving adequate consideration to the population exposure. In the present work we model and map the spatio-temporal distribution of population in the daily cycle and analyze it with a tsunami hazard map to better assess tsuna...

In recent years, in 2010 in particular, several major flood events hit various regions around the world. The Pakistan floods, which affected the country during July to September 2010, were notable as one of the worst natural disasters ever seen in terms of the number of people affected - 20.2 million of whom 1,985 people were killed. In this paper...