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Mining social media to inform peatland fire and haze disaster management

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Abstract

Peatland fires and haze events are disasters with national, regional, and international implications. The phenomena lead to direct damage to local assets, as well as broader economic and environmental losses. Satellite imagery is still the main and often the only available source of information for disaster management. In this article, we test the potential of social media to assist disaster management. To this end, we compare insights from two datasets: fire hotspots detected via NASA satellite imagery and almost all GPS-stamped tweets from Sumatra Island, Indonesia, posted during 2014. Sumatra Island is chosen as it regularly experiences a significant number of haze events, which affect citizens in Indonesia as well as in nearby countries including Malaysia and Singapore. We analyze temporal correlations between the datasets and their geo-spatial interdependence. Furthermore, we show how Twitter data reveal changes in users’ behavior during severe haze events. Overall, we demonstrate that social media are a valuable source of complementary and supplementary information for haze disaster management. Based on our methodology and findings, an analytics tool to improve peatland fire and haze disaster management by the Indonesian authorities is under development.

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Notes

  1. http://www.globalforestwatch.org.

  2. UN REDD Programme is United Nations Collaboration for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries.

  3. We tried different threshold values (e.g., 1/5), but the results were similar.

  4. Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics http://riau.bps.go.id/linkTabelStatis/view/id/210.

  5. http://www.menlh.go.id/DATA/ispu_riau.PDF.

  6. http://foursquare.com.

  7. For instance, IASC Guidelines Common Operational Datasets (CODs) in Disaster Preparedness and Response (Visit—www.humanitarianresponse.info).

  8. http://www.unisdr.org/we/coordinate/sendai-framework.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Johan Kieft from UN Environment who provided insight about haze disasters in Indonesia and George Hodge from Pulse Lab Jakarta for his assistance. Furthermore, we acknowledge the use of FIRMS data and imagery from the Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) system operated by the NASA/GSFC/Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA/HQ.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, ITeG Research Center, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Mark Kibanov & Gerd Stumme

  2. Pulse Lab Jakarta, UN Global Pulse, United Nations, Jakarta, Indonesia

    Imaduddin Amin & Jong Gun Lee

Authors
  1. Mark Kibanov
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  2. Gerd Stumme
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  3. Imaduddin Amin
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  4. Jong Gun Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark Kibanov.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 9.

Table 9 English translation of the filtering rules for the identification of corresponding tweets, see Table 2
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Kibanov, M., Stumme, G., Amin, I. et al. Mining social media to inform peatland fire and haze disaster management. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 7, 30 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-017-0446-1

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