Engr. Meriam Makinano-Santillan and Engr. Jojene R. Santillan, Project Leader and Project Staff, respectively, of the Geo-SAFER Agusan Project and full time faculty-researchers of the Caraga Center for Geo-Informatics (CCGeo) and the College of Engineering and Information Technology (CEIT) of the Caraga State University participated and presented papers at the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Geospatial Week (GSW) 2017 in Wuhan, China.

The ISPRS Geospatial Week (GSW) is a biennial event organized by various ISPRS Working Groups and by other parties active in areas of interest of ISPRS. It is a combination of workshops and symposia devoted to promote international cooperation and exchanges in surveying and mapping and the development of geospatial science and technology.

This year’s GSW was co-organized by the ISPRS and Wuhan University, and held from September 18 to 22, 2017 at the Wuhan East Lake International Conference Center. It consisted of 10 workshops/symposia/conferences that cover geospatial information acquisition, extraction from point clouds, optical/SAR imagery, and ubiquitous sensors, smart city and global changes, geospatial information mining and quality control, indoor 3D mapping and navigation, and UAV/UAS innovation applications.
Two (2) research papers discussing some of the major outputs of the Geo-SAFER Agusan Project were presented in the workshops/symposia of GSW 2017, particularly in the WebMGS2017 and ISSDQ 2017.

Engr. Meriam Makinano-Santillan presented the research paper entitled “Open Source Web-based Solutions for Disseminating and Analyzing Flood Hazard Information at the Community Level” in the “WebMGS-03: Web Mapping, Crowdsourcing & Open Software” technical session of WebMGS 2017 during the 2nd day of the GSW 2017 (September 19). The paper discusses the development, including the features and functionalities, of an open source web-based flood hazard information dissemination and analytical system called “Flood EViDEns”. Flood EViDEns is short for “Flood Event Visualization and Damage Estimations”, an application that was developed by the Caraga State University to address the needs of local disaster managers in the Caraga Region in Mindanao, Philippines in accessing timely and relevant flood hazard information before, during and after the occurrence of flood disasters at the community (i.e., barangay and household) level. While Flood EViDENs is considered a CSU Phil-LiDAR 1 Project output, there are continuous changes and improvements to the said application right after the completion of the CSU Phil-LiDAR 1 Project, especially that it will be used as a major flood hazard information dissemination application of the Geo-SAFER Mindanao Program. The aim of the paper is to report those changes and improvements. Presenting the paper in the WebMGS 2017 workshop of the ISPRS Geospatial Week was a good opportunity to gather inputs from a dedicated group of researchers from around the world on how to further improve the application and to learn best practices related to web-based mapping and visualization services.

On the same day, Engr. Jojene R. Santillan presented the research paper entitled “Elevation-based sea level rise vulnerability assessment of Mindanao, Philippines: are freely-available 30m DEMs good enough?” during the “ISSDQ-06Spatial Data Quality and Decision Making” technical session of ISSDQ 2017. The paper addresses two research questions: on whether freely-available Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) have the required spatial data quality for assessing sea-level rise (SLR) impact assessments in Mindanao; and on what factors contribute to flooding in Mindanao. SLR is a contributing factor which needs to be studied well. Unfortunately, the data available right now to conduct such assessment is either very detailed (e.g., LiDAR data) but incomplete; or not that detailed but complete (e.g,, freely-available 30-m DEMs). Since 30-m DEMs are the most popular elevation data for SLR assessment, there is a need to check its spatial data quality. SLR assessment studies such as this one make the Geo-SAFER Mindanao Program holistic in its approach with regards to flood hazard mapping since floods due to overflowing of rivers is not only being dealt with, but also with flooding due to SLR.

Overall, the GSW 2017 was a rare opportunity not only for the two faculty-researchers but also for the Caraga State University to showcase the Geo-SAFER Mindanao project outputs to an international audience. The participation also gave them immense opportunity to further their careers as Faculty-Researchers as they were exposed to State-of-the-Art researches, and was able to meet and connect with fellow researchers, professionals and institutions from all over the world.

Written by: MMS & JRS