Abstract
Teaching GIS for Disaster Management in the International Development Context
Track: Teaching with GIS Across the Curriculum
Authors: Africa Flores
The Regional Visualization and Monitoring System (SERVIR) is a joint project between USAID and NASA that provides Earth observations and predictive models to support well-informed decisions. Mesoamerica has been one of SERVIR's regions of focus since it hosts some of the populations most vulnerable to disasters. Through SERVIR, training workshops on disaster management and emergency response have been offered to local institutions as a capacity building tool. The use of ArcGIS has been essential to deliver these workshops, which cover vector, raster and image processing analyses. Through GIS it has been possible to empower Mesoamerican government institutions to harness the full potential of NASA and NOAA geospatial products. This presentation explains how, through these training workshops, national and local institutions have increased their capacities to assess extreme events by employing a number of geospatial datasets and satellite images in the disaster management process.