Natural disasters and spatial disparities in community resilience: disrupted human mobility, help requests, and voluntary support

This project examines the impacts of natural disasters on community resilience from a geographical perspective. Natural disasters heterogeneously disrupt both the mobility of residents and the short-term needs that they exhibit. This research concurrently examines spatial variation underlying changes in mobility patterns and the attempts by residents to elicit aid from government agencies and other community residents via social media postings. The findings inform the approaches used by first responders and municipality authorities to mitigate the effects of natural disasters. The project also contributes to the training of graduate students while building capacity for analogous geographical research by developing and disseminating reproducible methods for geospatial analysis of the effects that natural disasters have on communities. This multifaceted project concurrently examines three aspects of the human responses to natural disasters. First, as reflected in the anonymized records of mobile phone users, spatial variation in the disrupted patterns of mobility is considered as it relates to demographic and socioeconomic variation across neighborhoods. Second, the project examines spatial disparities in the extent to which residents request assistance from municipal authorities. Third, the researchers study the geography of help-seeking behavior among social media users and the roles of digital platforms in facilitating the support of volunteers. This project is empirically grounded on a compelling complement of datasets, engages theories in disaster resilience and disparities, and leverages a combination of methods in geographical and statistical analysis, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), and network modeling. Insights from this project and the developed methodological frameworks have the potential to inform future disaster studies on disaster-caused human mobility disruptions, community-initiated responses, and the roles that social media play in shaping these responses and spatial disparities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.