About this Research Topic
Disaster reconnaissance activities are essential for engineering communities to gain invaluable and perishable insight about a particular event and to advance our understanding of extreme events in general. Post-disaster missions help us better understand the vulnerability of the existing building stock, improvements needed for design and construction practice, and overall community resilience so that enhanced risk mitigation methods can be developed. While these activities are conventionally undertaken by teams working in the field, recent disasters that took place within the last year under the shadow of the global COVID-19 pandemic initiated a novel discussion among academic and practicing engineers as to whether the disaster reconnaissance activities could be coordinated entirely remotely.
This research topic aims to provide a platform to discuss the viability of hybrid methods, combining field and remote (virtual) investigation strategies, as a way forward in disaster reconnaissance. We wish to bring together examples of hybrid reconnaissance activities for events in the past year (such as 22 March Zagreb Earthquake and 30 October Aegean Sea Earthquake and Tsunami) to open up a dialogue within the relevant research and practicing communities around the world about the strengths and drawbacks of remotely coordinated post-disaster studies.
Within this framework, some of the questions/issues of relevance to this research topic are:
- Use of social media and other alternative data sources for post disaster damage, recovery and resilience assessment
- Failure bias in hybrid reconnaissance activities
- Data collection and analysis tools needed for hybrid/remote investigations
- Role of the COVID-19 pandemic (or future pandemics) on disaster mitigation, response, and recovery
- What aspects of conventional post-disaster investigations need tailoring to make them suitable for the hybrid model
- Are international field missions obsolete?
- Case studies with a critical discussion of the data collection methods employed and local participation.
Keywords: disaster reconnaissance, field investigation, hybrid missions, alternative data sources, remote
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
