Constructive Convergence: Imagery and Humanditarian Assistance

In the past few years-especially since the 2010 Haitian earthquake-Geospatial Information System (GIS) products, often based on imagery, have become critical enablers of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) efforts. Much more imagery is becoming available to the HA/DR community, complemented by increasing bandwidth to share it, more powerful "edge" devices to process it, global volunteer groups to help make sense of "crowd-sourced" information and high-level policy and doctrine that are becoming more supportive of collaboration around GIS products in HA/DR environments.