Disaster resilience is the capacity of a community to prepare for, absorb, recover from and adapt to disastrous events. A variety of resilience measurement models have been proposed, but most aim at developing standardized metrics. Although standardization can facilitate comparison and uniform disaster recovery policy, it hinders the development of place-based solutions that address the challenges and resilience goals of specific communities. As an operationalized concept, both the anticipated resilience goals and process to achieve the goals rely heavily on local contexts, including the size of the community, demographics, affluence and deprivation, as well as the underlying economic and social structures. The dynamics in environmental and human systems also demand the goals to be ever-adaptive. Therefore, externally imposed and static resilience frameworks often fall short in stimulating local changes in disaster preparedness and recovery. To fill these gaps, this project aims to develop and evaluate an innovative resilience framework based WebGIS that for participatory goal setting, real-time volunteered geographic information, data computation and analysis, and feedback loops.

Team Leaders:
Dr. Lei Zou, Department of Geography, College of Geosciences
Dr. Dongying Li, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, College of Architecture

Graduate Student Team Members:
Sagar Bohra, Management Information Systems, Mays Business School
Jathin Dhulipalla, Management Information Systems, Mays Business School
Chivariak Khus, Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Danging Liao, Urban Planning, College of Architecture
Andrew Pack, MD Plus Program, College of Medicine; Health Promotion and Community Health Sciences, School of Public Health
Zhengcong Yin, Geography, College of Geosciences

Undergraduate Student Team Members:
Citlali Castro, Sociology, College of Liberal Arts
Elizabeth Deya, Public Health, College of Public Health
Reesa Keskar, Applied Mathematical Sciences, College of Science
Katherine Stoeckl, Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts (Fall 2019)
Jaclyn Rosenthal, Management Information Systems and Business Honors, Mays Business Schools

Units Represented:

Department of Geography
College of Geosciences
Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning
College of Architecture
Urban Planning
Public Health