Crisis mapping

One benefit of the crisis mapping method over others is that it can increase situational awareness, since the public can report information and improve data management.

[6] One of the first major events to utilize crisis mapping was the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people and left homes and infrastructure badly damaged.

Since 2010, crisis mappers have mapped events in Libya (refugees), Japan (crowdsourcing and radiation monitoring for 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami), Chile (Humanitarian response to the 2010 Chile earthquake), Pakistan (2010 Pakistan floods, 2011 floods), Somalia (refugees), Alabama (2011 Super Outbreak), and dozens of smaller disasters and events around the world.

Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, hosting Syrians escaping the war, is being actively mapped on OpenStreetMap by UNHCR and REACH workers.

However, new skills are often acquired during "deployments", where a crisis mapping organization and interface is established to begin collecting data.

Evolution of humanitarian mapping in OpenStreetMap in regard to major disaster activations, the socio-technical development of the community and global political frameworks.
Spatial distribution of the number of buildings (top) and highways (bottom) added to OpenStreetMap between 2008-01-01 and 2020-05-20 in regard to overall (left) and humanitarian (right) mapping activities