GEO Community Response to COVID-19

Join Indigenous communities in this crowdsourcing challenge to co-design culturally appropriate, ICT solutions to tackle COVID-19. The project involves developing a series of virtual hackathons in various Indigenous and under-represented communities. The challenges will then become part of the GEO INDIGENOUS COVID-19 HACKATHON 2020 that will take place during June 5-7 2020 where anyone from around the world can participate virtually from home to come up with innovative solutions.

The GEO Health Community of Practice (CoP) has activated the global EO4Health community to coordinate responses to COVID-19. The GEO Health CoP has organized a series of weekly Teleconferences on ‘Earth Observations and COVID-19: A Virtual Round the Room Update’ to provide an opportunity to share research applications and related activities that use Earth observations to advance knowledge on COVID-19 transmission. The GEO Health CoP has also compiled a list of relevant COVID-19 funding opportunities and challenge competitions. Community members are encouraged to share potential opportunities by sending a brief description to the GEO Health Community of Practice.

Monitoring the COVID-19 crisis demands fine scale demographic data related to vulnerable groups, including those related to age. Gridded versions of population data, such as the age classes provided by WorldPop could be considered. In preparation of the next phase, when movement restrictions are released, understanding the general mobility of populations can help model the probability of personal contact and contagion. Concepts like the Functional Urban Areas and Degree of Urbanization generated by the GEO Human Planet Initiative (HPI) community might support such activities. In addition, GEO HPI has been approached by various groups involved in crisis management for advising on how Earth observations can be used to help. GEO HPI is collecting examples to share and those interested should email: Daniele Ehrlich JRC-GHSL@ec.europa.eu.

GEOGLAM is providing timely and transparent information on global agriculture conditions in near real time. The COVID-19 pandemic is predicted to exacerbate existing food crises and drive worsening food insecurity among already vulnerable populations. For major food exporting nations, the Crop Monitor for the Agricultural Monitoring Information System (AMIS) is available to promote transparency and policy coordination in international food markets to prevent unexpected price hikes. For food insecure regions of the world, the Crop Monitor for Early Warning (CM4EW) reveals crop conditions and provides early warning of potential impacts that may affect food supply for the most vulnerable populations.

This COVID-19 Webinar will provide an update on how UK space sector companies and academia are being impacted by the pandemic, as well as the latest advice, information and resources available. This is an opportunity to engage directly with senior leadership from government and industry and share how COVID-19 is impacting your organisation. Tell the UK government how it can support space businesses and help yours to recover once the pandemic is over – complete the weekly survey on the UKspace COVID-19 portal.

ACAPS is focusing on the immediate, short and medium-term secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. They produce global analysis, providing a broad overview of the situation overall, as well as context specific analysis with a narrower focus on regions, countries and crisis hot spots. Looking beyond the mortality and morbidity caused directly by COVID -19 in the short term, the key areas of analysis include a focus on the impact on essential health services, impact on access and availability of regular goods and services, humanitarian operations and social cohesion and protection.

The AfriGEO COVID-19 Working Group was formed for countries in the region to share their different experiences in response using EO data, to identify data gaps and needs and formulate ways to share data and tools with each other. Key to this effort is data sharing efforts to develop capacity for governments and participating organizations and private sector. It is identifying EO data needs, gaps and challenges experienced to support national and regional COVID-19 monitoring and post COVID-19 recovery.

Learn more in the brochure here.

ADB is calling for solutions to measure the short-term changes in economic activities brought about by COVID-19. This specific challenge will make use of EO data, satellite images or any processing infrastructures. Solutions should provide models and data analytics presented in a dashboard format in select countries in Asia. Join the challenge to win up to USD 10,000, and get a chance to implement the solution with ADB.

This GIS COVID-19 Dashboard is delivering reliable and timely reporting to the general public at this critical time. The WebGIS platform is updated on a daily basis and provides robust and accurate information about the COVID-19 spread worldwide by producing up to date statistics and graphs aiming to depict the impact of the disease at global and national level. In the case of Greece, the platform allows for insights at a deeper level. The BEYOND Centre of Excellence is also also participating in the EUvsVirus Hackathon here.

Big Earth Data is an interdisciplinary open access academic publication and the world’s first big data journal on Earth sciences, aiming to provide an efficient and high-quality platform for promoting ’big data’ sharing, processing and analyses. They are calling for paper submissions addressing the opportunities and challenges of big Earth data in public health research and practice. Contributions exploring the linkage between COVID-19 and environmental and public health, as well as the multiple impacts of human behavior changes on the Earth are encouraged.

Remote sensing and Earth observations using European Space Agency satellite imagery is allowing scientists to monitor how countries are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. By tracking the declines in nitrogen oxide emissions over regions where activity is restricted, scientists can frame the scope of change in those nations. A team of Earth systems scientists at Chapman have started studying atmospheric images to see if directives for people to stay home are affecting nitrogen oxide emissions. If the satellite images display patches of dark blue, it means that emissions are down as companies close plants, people drive less and general activity is reduced to slow spread of the virus.

The COVID-19 Knowledge and Data Hub (GCdataPR COVID-19 KDH) was launched a few hours after the WHO announced COVID-19 as a global public health emergency on 31 January 2020. The system is hosted by the Global Change Research Data Publishing and Repository of IGSNRR, CAS, the China GEO data publishing center. The HUB features daily situation reports and data from global and Chinese sources; publications from journals, including more than 6000 articles from more than 1000 journals published during the last two and a half months; and data attracted from the daily situation reports and articles including geographical data sets.

The CropWatch team used multi-source remote sensing data including Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8, together with the field survey data collected using the GVG Field Data Collector App (which is freely available at Google Play or iOS APP Store). Analyses based on big Earth data have revealed favourable crop conditions and yield for 2020 is expected to be above that of 2019 for the summer harvest. In general, limited impacts from COVID-19 were observed on winter crop greening-up and land preparation for early rice in China. These results have been published in the February CropWatch bulletin.

DigitalGlobe is committed to providing accurate, high-resolution satellite imagery and information to support response and recovery in the wake of large-scale natural disasters. Maxar’s Open Data Program has released an initial set of high-resolution satellite imagery in support of the COVID-19 response efforts. Per requests from humanitarian partners, this release will include Metro imagery basemaps for the following African cities: Addis Ababa, Abidjan, Dakar, Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Ouagadougou, Accra, Luanda, Kinshasa, Nairobi and part of northern Ghana.

For the first time, we are experiencing a global pandemic and analyzing it as it happens. Using five-research based pandemic trends, ESRI describes the evolving situation in countries. To explain the trends, ESRI created the COVID-19: The First Global Pandemic of the Information Age Story Map. The story also has maps showing the key aspects of each country’s situation. They update the maps each day with the previous day of data from Johns Hopkins University.

Access GIS resources including ready to use maps, data, applications, models, templates, and learning resources to help monitor, manage, and communicate the impact of the outbreak and guide the recovery.  Use and share these resources to help your community or organization respond effectively, and find a link to request assistance from Esri’s Disaster Response Program offering assistance to those in need. Esri COVID-19 Hub contains an ever evolving collection of free resources from around the globe. This content from a diverse community of public, private and academic contributors changes daily.

ECMWF is involved in a number of activities related to the COVID-19 crisis. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has created an app that allows health authorities and epidemiology centres to explore the claims that temperature and humidity could affect the spread of coronavirus. The application also shows how temperature and humidity around the world are likely to change over the next few months, based on C3S data going back twenty years. Access the app here. The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has launched a mini-site to display information about air quality in Europe. CAMS has provided an analysis of the effect of the lockdown on air quality in northern Italy here.

The European Commission, through the Copernicus EMS, is monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak and spread in Italy and across the world. The Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping provides critical data to Italian authorities in their COVID-19 relief efforts.  video compilation shows nitrogen dioxide levels decreasing over China in response to COVID-19 lockdowns in the country. ESA has issued open calls around the use of EO in response to the COVID-19 outbreak and includes specific funding opportunities for responses in Italy. Additional information can be found here.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) has recently published a viewer to assess how the lockdown and related measures implemented by many European countries to stop the spread of COVID-19 have led to a sudden decrease in economic activities, including a drop in road transport in many cities. To assess how this has affected concentrations of air pollution, the EEA has developed a viewer that tracks the weekly average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). The viewer uses hourly observations on the ground from about 3 000 monitoring stations across European countries.

The European Space Agency (ESA), in coordination with the European Commission, is launching a special edition of the Custom Script Contest, focused on the support of space assets during the COVID-19 crisis, managed by Euro Data Cube group. Following a similar format, but further to looking for new algorithms, we are in the quest for ideas on how satellite data could help monitor and mitigate the situation for the upcoming months, while the world will organize to get back to business and will need to adapt from this crisis.

GRID3 is marshalling its resources and capacities to help partner governments plan rapid responses to COVID-19. These national-level efforts are part of a broader GRID3 drive to reorganise and scale-up its existing resources to support COVID-19 response, including gathering data on settlement extents throughout sub-Saharan Africa and convening a team to build data systems around a critical core dataset in many sub-Saharan African countries.

Geospatial World has built a comprehensive platform that provides information from major dashboards and apps, including the latest news and analysis using geospatial data and technologies that are tracking, comatting and informing the response to COVID-19.

GEOTERRAIMAGE (GTI) is a small and medium sized enterprise (SMME) providing unique, up-to-date spatial datasets to various State and private sector organisations and agencies in South Africa to assist with tracking and management of COVID-19. GTI has the unique capability of combining recent earth observation imagery, derived spatial information with ancillary spatial and non-spatial data-sets. The GTI updated (2020) spatial population distribution product for South Africa is derived from 2020 satellite imagery combined with the most recent 2011 census, the 2016 STATSA Community Survey and the annual STATSA mid-year estimates. It has been successfully used to model COVID-19 risk areas to support the National and Provincial Departments of Health.

The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data is looking towards the data, and is supporting partners with vital resources, quality data, and tools to analyze and use the data, implement good practices, and share experiences. You can find a round-up of resources including WHO data, shared data resources, regional and country-level dashboards, visualizations and maps, response and calls to action, research and analysis, and tools on their COVID-19 Resources page.

ISRO, Department of Space is supporting various States (Provinces) by providing geospatial tools and location based solutions to fight against COVID-19, including the national level COVID-19 Tracker. ISRO also carried out studies to assess the impacts on reduced air pollution and water pollution over India. ISRO has customised Geo-portal ‘Bhuvan-COVID-19’ at national level. In Bihar State, a unique tool helps map the epicenter of the infections and depict containment zones or hotspots for containment with tertiary buffer zones to manage the spread. In Telangana State (South Indian State), location based services are enabled using a mobile App linked to Geo-portal ‘Bhuvan-COVID-19’ that helps in mobile vegetable markets in Hyderabad. Learn more about these projects here.

In response to the request by governments for expert insights relating to COVID-19 and its impacts, the International Journal of Remote Sensing is inviting new contributions relating to COVID-19. Such areas may include agriculture and farming, civil contingency planning and management, climate change, countryside, education, emergency planning and services, energy, environment, health economics, health services, ports and maritime, surveillance, transport, waste, and water. The journal will prioritise the peer review of all relevant research. Authors are also encouraged to publish and share the data that forms the basis of their research in line with FAIR data principles, and our own data policies. They have made special arrangements with the publisher to be able to offer papers related to COVID-19 free to access.

A research team at Johns Hopkins University is undertaking a study to quantify hydrometeorological sensitivities of COVID-19, using a suite of Earth Observations from models and satellites. Resulting sensitivity estimates are integrated to disease dynamics models to inform projections of COVID-19 case counts and hospital burden through multiple epidemic waves. The project will supplement the ongoing work to study Environmental Determinants of Enteric Infectious Disease, see a summary of the project that emphasizes the links to the ongoing EO4Health and NASA GEO Health programme.

Data provided by the Territorial Viewer is taken directly from reports published by the Ministry of Health (MINSAL) in near real-time. The red circles refer to the active cases located over the communes and areas. In addition, the Viewer links to the COVID-19 Data Table led by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation to provide open information to promote the use of data for scientific, clinical research and for innovative solutions that contribute to the taking of decisions of the authorities and citizens in the face of this pandemic.

The Vulnerability Viewer facilitates better decision making and helps to focus prevention on vulnerable populations in the current health emergency. Groups are shown by levels of vulnerability based on their census source, and are matched to information from the National Population and Housing Census 2018 and records from individual health service delivery (RIPS) which contains the pathologies from 2011 to date for each patient. The Viewer allows decision makers to know where the population is located, due to their demographic characteristics and their health condition, that are at higher risk of complications in the case of COVID-19.

On May 30-31, NASA, along with the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), is inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon to help tackle COVID-19.

A task force is working on this global health crisis using EO and relevant datasets to produce The Spatiotemporal Rapid Response Gateway to COVID-19 Data, Information and Knowledge. This gateway leverages established systems and contains five major components, including a) Data collection and preparation based on our previous spatiotemporal center projects of geospatial data crawling and spatial data infrastructure, b) data services based on the previous clearinghouse, data center, and Harvard Dataverse, c) machine learning-based data analytics and mining, d) public health infectious disease transmission model based on the Harvard and international communities, and e) outreach activities based on monthly training, collaborations on data service and on-demand analytics through the international task forces. Cloud-based big spatiotemporal data analytical tools developed in the center are being integrated into easy-to-use workflows to assist researchers, in collaboration with public health experts, to identify case trajectories, rebuild traces, and forecast future trends.

In the geospatial response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, OEA Consults have developed an online Geovizualization Dashboard with a Iive prediction segment that is helping to make future case predictions. The Georesponse Dashboard is part of innovative drone mapping and planning services that have helped Lagos State Authorities plan previous waterway projects.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 499 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. OGC”s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available, open geospatial standards. OGC members are the leaders in the field of geospatial data, technology, and research. Their use of OGC standards and practices enable the seamless, interoperable use of disparate geospatial resources - in turn connecting people, communities, technology, and decision making for the good of society. They have collated a list of geospatial and location data and services to help you better understand the impact of COVID-19 available here.

The Working Group on Indigenous and Earth Sciences Knowledges and Practices in response to COVID-19 is foregrounded Indigenous perspectives in defining research questions for potential intercultural collaboration between Indigenous and Earth sciences to drive urgent, culturally relevant, and appropriate responses to COVID-19. The Working Group includes intercultural, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary representatives from the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences, a nation-wide network of over 650 scientists, educators, students, and community leaders and organizers.

Learn more in the PDF here.

The South African National Space Agency (SANSA), through its twin mandates to acquire, disseminate and distribute space based data and information for decision making, as well as coordinating the South African Space Sector, is aligning itself and the South African Space Sector’s capabilities and capacities towards the fight against COVID -19. The objective is to provide decision makers with relevant space derived spatial information and tools to support evidence based decision making in their efforts at implementing a national response to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. SANSA is working on data applications and tools to assist the South African Government with decision making during this pandemic.

SIOS has new activities launched in response to COVID-2019. All these activities are crucial to help engage the Arctic research community, specifically those working in Svalbard. Projects include patching field data gaps with remote sensing while COVID-19 travel restrictions prevent field measurements. They have released a special issue on remote sensing applications in Svalbard.

SIOS has organized a completely online conference on EO and RS applications in Svalbard during 04-05 June 2020

SIOS’s Webinar Series, An anchor point to a drifting world, was launched in response to COVID-19.

The coronavirus pandemic constitutes an unprecedented challenge with severe societal and socio-economic consequences. In order to shed new light on these changes taking place, ESA and the European Commission have worked closely together to create the ‘Rapid Action Coronavirus Earth observation’ dashboard. The platform, which was unveiled today during an online event, uses Earth observation satellite data to measure the impact of the coronavirus lockdown and monitor post-lockdown recovery.

The dashboard allows for the monitoring of key environmental parameters – such as air and water quality changes, economic and human activities including industry, shipping, construction, traffic, as well as agricultural productivity.

One of the platform’s features allows for the tracking of air pollution worldwide. Using data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite, the map shows the averaged nitrogen dioxide concentrations over major cities and regions across the world.

NASA is already contributing to the COVID-19 response in a variety of ways, including lending its supercomputing capability to advance research for treatments and a vaccine, as well as artificial intelligence expertise to develop new data mining techniques for answering high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19. NASA is seeking additional viable solutions where the agency can make a meaningful difference. NASA has launched an agency wide call for ideas on its internal crowdsourcing platform NASA @ WORK. The internal website fosters collaboration and provides NASA employees with an inventive way to share knowledge and solve challenges. For the initial call for ideas, NASA leadership, working with the White House and other government agencies, determined three focus areas around personal protective equipment, ventilation devices, and monitoring and forecasting the spread and impacts of the virus.

NOAA is assessing changes in emissions resulting from the societal actions to combat COVID-19 and the consequential impacts on air quality. Monitoring atmospheric composition during the COVID-19 economic slowdown will provide a new baseline of pollutants. Monitoring the eventual increase will improve our understanding of source contributions to global pollution and approaches to rapidly update emission inventories for air quality forecast models. NOAA will be working with international partners to leverage the global constellation of satellite and in-situ (e.g. ground based, aircraft, balloon) observations.

Using remote sensing, GIS and big data technologies, Chinese GISers at LREIS have developed consultation reports to assist the government to curb outbreaks of COVID-19. The reports cover the spread pattern of disease, projection and curb of cases, and restoration of order after the pandemic. LREIS and StarEarth have launched a “COVID-19 in Maps” - a mobile app and mini program which allows health authorities and general users to explore the spatial distribution of epidemic disease at provincial, prefectural and county level day by day. The application also can collect data using a crowdsourcing approach. StarEarth feeds the data back to communities through an api. As a cloud-native EO data sharing and application platform, Image World which is sponsored by China GEO provides base maps and thematic mapping techniques to support the application development.

UNDRR is closely monitoring the situation to identify the roles it along with partners can play in regard to the pandemic. Visit the UNDRR COVID-19 link for key messages, webinars, policy briefs, technical guidance, partners initiatives and other tools. Register for the upcoming webinars including ‘Risk communication to prevent the spread of COVID-19: Countering the Infodemic’ on April 30 here. Acknowledging initiatives to support societies in their response, recovery and, looking forward, preventive action to this unprecedented crisis, they will continue to share examples from members in their regions and countries.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, through its UN-SPIDER programme, has created this COVID-19 emergency response overview page to facilitate the discovery of examples of contributions of space technologies to addressing COVID-19 that are being published by government agencies, international and regional organizations, academia, civil society and the private sector. Visit the United Nations Coronavirus Portal for more information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease.

High and low risk regions were identified by integrating GIS grid based and multi-criteria analysis to provide information about high risk COVID-19 populations across the country. High resolution data (1km by 1km) of individual and transmission risk factors for the whole country was transformed to a common scale and subjected to a weighted overlay to identify the high risk areas at granular level across the country. All the raster files used for the analysis were provided by Fraym. Individual and Transmission risk factors namely; population density, household size, smoking population, mode of transport (personal car and use of bodabodas), access to water and handwashing, percentage of population in manual labor, elderly population (>60 years) and household size. Slum areas such as Kwa Njenga, Kwa Reuben, Viwandani, Imara Daima came out as the highest risk areas in Nairobi County. To cushion these vulnerable populations during this pandemic, identifying these risk factors will play a key role in providing a safety net to these communities.

The World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Dashboard is a platform which aims to share information about public health events and emergencies. The data on the dashboard is updated regularly, and data is accurate as at time of refreshing. In addition to mapping the spread of the pandemic, WHO is the leading source of information for the international response to COVID-19. The daily situation reports, fact sheets and other materials can be found here.