ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) did an amazing job in creating a geoportal that provides interactive maps, charts, and infographics about the earthquakes and relief efforts in Nepal. ICIMOD was honored with the ESRI Humanitarian Award in ESRI User Conference 2015 for their role in assisting Nepalese government with GIS technology.
The key features of the geoportal are as followings:
- interactive maps and charts with facts and figures at national, district and municipality levels
- facts and figures under different thematic areas such as geohazards, infrastructure, education, landslides, agriculture etc.
- swipe visualization of high resolution satellite imagery to view before and after earthquake effect
- story map journals of affected districts providing the status of casualties, damage, and response efforts
- information on geo-hazards, including field data on landslides with 3D visualization
- incident reporting for disaster events in near real-time
The geoportal is very responsive and the rendering of the layers is smooth. The graphs are clearly laid out. The home page is a collection of different thematic Map viewers, such as 'Country profile', 'Landslide assessment', 'Geo-hazard', 'Swipe map', 'Incident reporting' etcetera. The Map viewers are extremely user friendly. However, the geoportal would have been better with addition of basic Map viewer tools such as measuring, simple querying, exporting attribute data and printing tools. Having said that, the geoportal reveals how GIS technology can be effectively used for natural disaster management.
