News — 16 March, 2015

Mapping Vanuatu Islands

The Cyclone has come and gone from Vanuatu Islands. The devastation is massive with the BBC reporting that Development has been wiped out. In the past few days, the HOT community rose to support by mapping using pre-disaster imagery. The Vanatau Archipel (800 km long) was severely hit by the Pam Cyclone. While HOT has not been formally activated, the community prepared and mapped anyway.

In the space of less than 24 hours, the HOT community more than doubled the amount of map data in OpenStreetMap. This was done by first covering all the priority islands to map with both Tasking Manager projects about 99% completed. The community used existing imagery and added this to our Task Manager tool to divide up the tiles (blocks on a map).

The Active Tasks for this project are:

• http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/943
• http://tasks.hotosm.org/project/944

To support mappers, the community leaders created some Mapping Vanuatu guides.  One of the primary focuses has been infrastructure. This is a diagram of how to map communications towers:

 

 

Mappers are covering the pre-disaster imagery. It is hoped that post disaster imagery can be updated in the next while.

Key Resources:

• Guide for Mapping Vanuatu
• Wiki page and Tasks for Vanuatu 

Get Involved:

New to OSM? See LearnOSM and MapGive for some details on how to get started.

• IRC -irc://irc.oftc.net #hot
• HOT Email List -Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) Mailling-List (Subscription Required)