Diana María Contreras Mojica

Cardiff University | CU · School of earth and environmental sciences

On April 25 2015, at 11:56 local time, Mw 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people, injuring 22,000, and leaving millions homeless. Seven years later, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) deployed an earthquake return mission to monitor changes in community resilience, recovery, and reconstruction progress. A...

Collecting and analysing data after an earthquake is essential to determine its impact. In 2014 The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) launched a multichannel rapid information system comprising websites, a Twitter quakebot, and a smartphone app for global earthquake eyewitnesses: the LastQuake system. This system collects intensity...

In this conference paper, we assess the progress in post-disaster recovery by analysing 4349 tweets posted between 4th and 10th April 2019 that we collected around the 10th anniversary of the earthquake in L'Aquila. Text data collected from social media is unstructured; therefore, we need to use natural language processing techniques such as topic...

Recent evidence from marine sedimentary rocks suggests that clay minerals were important in the supply of bioessential nutrients to seawater at the end of the Sturtian Snowball Earth glaciation that occurred ∼ 717–660 million years ago. However, little is known about the identity of these clay minerals, their abundance and distribution in the pre-g...

On the 25th April 2015 a magnitude 7.8Mw struck Nepal, followed by two strong aftershocks on the 26 th April and 12 th May (6.7Mw and 7.3Mw, respectively). Over 9000 people were killed, 22,000 injured with over 500,000 homes either damaged or destroyed, resulting in economic loses of over US$7 Billion. A key component of understanding the resilienc...

In May 2022, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) revisited Nepal to assess the progress made in implementing the recovery program following the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake. The 7.8Mw earthquake, and the 6.7Mw and 7.3Mw aftershocks, resulted in the loss of over 9,000 lives, while 22,000 people were injured. Additionally, more than...

Recovery is a complex, multidimensional, long-term process of restoration of living conditions after a disaster. Memorial days of disasters represent an opportunity to evaluate the progress of these recovery processes. We evaluated Nepal's recovery progress based on text data posted on Twitter and Instagram from March 5th to May 2nd, 2020. This per...

On April 25 2015, at 11:56 local time, Mw 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people, injuring 22,000, and leaving millions homeless. Seven years later, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) deployed an earthquake return mission to monitor changes in community resilience, recovery, and reconstruction progress. A...

Recovery is a complex multidimensional long-term process of restoration of living conditions after a disaster. Memorial days of disasters represent an opportunity to evaluate the progress of these recovery processes. We evaluated Nepal's recovery progress based on text data posted on Twitter and Instagram from March 5th to May 2nd, 2020. This perio...

Recovery is a complex, multidimensional long-term process of restoration of living conditions after a disaster. Following an earthquake, there is substantial demand for information. However, data collection usually occurs only during the emergency phase. The absence of data afterwards has resulted in limited knowledge of earthquakes' long-term imp...

Recovery is a complex multidimensional long-term process of restoration of living conditions after a disaster. Following an earthquake, there is substantial demand for information. However, data collection usually occurs only during the emergency phase. The absence of data afterwards has resulted in limited knowledge of earthquakes' long-term impac...

Colombia is in one of the most active seismic zones on Earth, where the Nazca, Caribbean, and South American plates converge. Approximately 83 % of the national population lives in intermediate to high seismic hazard zones, and a significant part of the country's building inventory dates from before the nation's first seismic design code (1984). At...

With the rise of social media, new analytical tools are coming to light and are becoming widely used within the analysis of disasters, including earthquakes. Social media, such as Twitter, presents an ideal opportunity to assess the opinions of residents and users across the world. This paper uses this opportunity to identify the successes and fail...

Collecting data after an earthquake is essential to determine the phenomenon's impact on the population and built environment. To determine this impact, data must be collected on the number of injured or casualties among the population, buildings and infrastructure damaged. In 2018 The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) launched a m...

Presentation at the symposium: The November 26, 2019 Mw6.4 Durres, Albania Earthquake: Regional Seismicity, Regional Geodynamics and Seismic Hazard (ISDE-2023)

Traditionally, earthquake impact assessments have been made via fieldwork by non-governmental organisations (NGO's) sponsored data collection; however, this approach is time-consuming, expensive and often limited. Recently, social media (SM) has become a valuable tool for quickly collecting large amounts of first-hand data after a disaster and show...

On 30 October 2020, an earthquake of Mw 6.9 hit the Aegean coasts of Turkey and Greece. The epicentre was some 14 km northeast of Avlakia on Samos Island, and 25 km southwest of Seferihisar, Turkey, triggering also a tsunami. The event has been followed by >4,000 aftershocks up to Mw 5.2 The Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) h...

Growing urbanisation and climate extremes prompt urban research on vulnerability and resilience. At the same time, socioecological impacts and interactions are studied in equally affected rural areas as well. However, interlinkages between urban and rural research and vulnerability and resilience also need attention. Mutual interdependencies exist...

Colombia is in one of the most active seismic zones on Earth, where the Nazca, Caribbean, and South American plates converge. Approximately 83 % of the national population lives in intermediate to high seismic hazard zones, and a significant part of the country’s building inventory dates from before the nation’s first seismic design code (1984). At...

After an earthquake, it is necessary to understand its impact to provide relief and plan recovery. Social media (SM) and crowdsourcing platforms have recently become valuable tools for quickly collecting large amounts of first-hand data after a disaster. Earthquake-related studies propose using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) for...

On 27 February 2010, a magnitude 8.8 Mw earthquake struck Chile and provoked a tsunami that wreaked havoc on the Chilean coast. A total of 830 failures in the transportation system were registered on roads, with 91 concession bridges and 221 public bridges suffered damage or collapsed. This study aims to test a methodology for teaching people about...

After an earthquake, it is necessary to understand its impact to provide relief and plan recovery. Social media (SM) and crowdsourcing platforms have recently become valuable tools for quickly collecting large amounts of first-hand data after a disaster. Earthquake-related studies propose using data mining and natural language processing (NLP) for...

The Cayambe volcanic complex represents a hazard to the 85 795 inhabitants in their surroundings who base their economy on floriculture. To our best knowledge, no automated estimates have been made of the economic impact that an eventual eruption of the Cayambe volcano in the area would cause. The delineation of areas affected by ashfall were obtai...

Earthquakes are one of the most catastrophic natural phenomena. After an earthquake, earthquake reconnaissance enables effective recovery by collecting data on building damage and other impacts. This paper aims to identify state-of-the-art data sources for building damage assessment and provide guidance for more efficient data collection. We have r...

Presentation in the framework of the Seminar Series – School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Cardiff University, undertaken on the 19th October 2021. Recorded session available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK2G8rX7Dpk

Memorial days of disasters represent an opportunity to evaluate the progress of recovery. Social media posts from the 10th anniversary of the earthquakes, in L’Aquila, Haiti, Chile, and Canterbury constitute a valuable source of data to mine insights into the progress of their recovery. The sentiments of affected people have the potential to highli...

Earthquakes are one of the most catastrophic natural phenomena. After an earthquake, earthquake reconnaissance enables effective recovery by collecting building damage data and other impacts. This paper aims to identify state-of-the-art data sources for building damage assessment and provide guidance for more efficient data collection. We have revi...

Successfully conducted capacity building workshop on Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure for sustainable development in ECO countries. Workshop material can be retrieved from: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1as4ZM1wamX4JkziMzKYLVyQbxBBA9DRO

Memorial days of disasters represent an opportunity to evaluate the progress of recovery. This article uses sentiment analysis (SA) to assess post-disaster recovery on the 10th anniversary of L’Aquila’s earthquake using Twitter data. We have analyzed 4349 tweets from 4 to 10 April 2019 with the hashtag: #L’Aquila that we have obtained from a third-...

This database contains the supervised classification of the tweets related to the 10th anniversary of the earthquake in L'Aquila according to their polarity for the assessment of the post-disaster recovery process. Tweets were collected by the third-party vendor: TweetBinder in the period from April 4th to 10th 2019, with the hashtag:#L'Aquila.

30 undergraduate students from the School of Civil Engineering from la Universidad de Valparaiso in Chile attended the online lecture entitled: 'The role of social media in emergency response and post-disaster recovery'. In this lecture, we discussed the role of social media in emergency response using the case studies of the 2020 earthquake in Zag...

Earthquakes are one of the most catastrophic natural phenomena. After an earthquake, earthquake reconnaissance enables effective recovery by collecting building damage data and other impacts. This paper aims to identify state-of-the-art data sources for building damage assessment and guide more efficient data. This paper reviews 38 articles that in...

This EEFIT Field Mission report details the effects of the Mw 6.9 earthquake which struck the Aegean coasts of Greece and Turkey on 30 October 2020. This report covers: - Seismotectonics - Geotechnical observations and site response - Damage assessments and observations - Tsunami - Relief, response and recovery observations - Social media analyses...

El volcán Guagua Pichincha es considerando el tercer volcán más peligroso en el Ecuador continental, y representa una amenaza potencial para la población expuesta. En esta investigación se modela, mediante un análisis estadístico de simulaciones numéricas, la dispersión y caída de ceniza al 75% de probabilidad de ocurrencia para zonificar la amenaz...

Contreras, D., Wilkinson, S., Balan, N., & James, P. (2020). Social Media in Emergency Management and Post-disaster Recovery. The cases of Albania, Zagreb, L'Aquila, Haiti and Chile. Keynote speech at the International Conference on Science in Engineering and Technology (ICoSiET) 2020, Palu, Indonesia.

Acknowledgements The team are indebted to the following people and their institutions for their generous response, contacts, and personal insights. The fact that this reconnaissance exercise was carried out entirely remotely and during a time of uncertainty makes their cooperation and support even more significant.

Memorial days of disasters represent an opportunity to evaluate the progress of recovery. Social media posts from the 10th anniversary of the earthquakes, in L'Aquila, Haiti, Chile, and Canterbury constitute a valuable source of data to mine insights into the progress of their recovery. The sentiments of affected people have the potential to highli...

Society and economy are only two of the dimensions of vulnerability. This paper aims to elucidate the state of the art of data sources, spatial variables, indicators, methods, indexes and tools for the spatial assessment of socio-economic vulnerability (SEV) related to geohazards. This review was first conducted in December 2018 and re-run in March...

During the 2012–2016 drought in La Guajira, Colombia, child mortality rates rose to 23.4 out of 1000. Most of these children belonged to the Wayuu indigenous community, the largest and one of the most vulnerable in Colombia. At the municipal level, this study found a significant positive correlation between the average child mortality rate and hous...

The El Niño phenomenon in 2012 triggered a drought in La Guajira, Colombia that extended until 2016. In this period, the average child mortality rate in the area reached 23.4 out of 1000. The aim of this paper is to identify the integrated spatial pattern (ISP) of a single indicator in this case; child mortality. At the same time, the ISP identifie...

Cities are systems composed of infrastructure and densely built spaces inhabited by population. The provision of sustainable urban infrastructure is a challenge for urban planners, decision-makers and engineers due to the rise in urban population. Moreover, the performance of the systems that compose the city is stressed by the occurrence of natura...

EEFIT Session

El complejo volcánico Cayambe representa una potencial amenaza para poblaciones que basan su economía en la floricultura. En este trabajo, se presenta: 1) modelar espacialmente escenarios de erupción del volcán, 2) modelar espacialmente el potencial impacto de estos escenarios de riesgos por afectación de lahares y de ceniza; y 3) evaluar los impac...

The social and economic dimensions are only two of the dimensions of vulnerability. This paper aims to review the various case study areas, hazards, methods, spatial variables/indicators/indexes and tools addressed and used in the spatial assessment of socio-economic vulnerability in the period between 2008 and 2018. This review was conducted in De...

Costa Rica is a country located along the Pacific Ring of Fire. The city of San José is the capital of Costa Rica and head of the province of the same name. San Jose is the economic, social, politic and cultural centre of the country and the Great Metropolitan Area has a population of 2,723,850 inhabitants. In the case an earthquake happens, it is...

Transportation networks play an essential role in keeping the economic and social well-being of a community. Roads play a vital role during the emergency phase, early recovery, recovery and development regarding accessibility, evacuation, rescue, building reconstruction, reactivation of the economy and reconstruction of the urban fabric. The major...

Transportation networks play an essential role in keeping the economic and social well-being of a community. Roads play a vital role during the emergency phase, early recovery, recovery and development regarding accessibility, evacuation, rescue, building reconstruction, reactivation of the economy and reconstruction of the urban fabric. The major...

Costa Rica is a country located along the Pacific Ring of Fire. The city of San José is the capital of Costa Rica and head of the province of the same name. San Jose is the economic, social, politic and cultural centre of the country and the Great Metropolitan Area has a population of 2,723,850 inhabitants. In the case an earthquake happens, it is...

The complex volcano of Cayambe in Ecuador represents a potential threat, especially for populations that base their economy in floriculture. In this work, we present: 1) spatially modeling the eruption scenarios of the volcano, 2) spatially modeling the potential impact of these risk scenarios by lahar and ash affectation; and 3) evaluate the socio...

The complex volcano of Cayambe in Ecuador represents a potential threat, especially for populations that base their economy in floriculture. In this work, we present: 1) spatially modeling the eruption scenarios of the volcano, 2) spatially modeling the potential impact of these risk scenarios by lahar and ash affectation; and 3) evaluate the socio...

Reporte producido en el marco del componente de Vulnerabilidad Social y Resiliencia del Proyecto para la Evaluación y la Mitigación del Riesgo Sísmico en el Caribe y Centroamérica (Proyecto CCARA) Versión [3.0]-[Marzo, 2019]

Evaluations of the impacts of the Climate Change in La Guajira, Colombia

This presentation elaborates on the drivers of the child mortality during the drought in La Guajira, Colombia between 2012 and 2016.