A cyberinfrastructure for community resilience assessment and visualization

Disaster resilience is a major societal challenge. Cartography and GIS can contribute substantially to this research area. This paper describes a cyberinfrastructure for disaster resilience assessment and visualization for all counties in the United States. Aided by the Application Programming Interface-enabled web mapping and component-oriented web tools, the cyberinfrastructure is designed to better serve the US communities with comprehensive resilience information. The resilience assessment tool is based on the resilience inference measurement model. This web application delivers the resilience assessment tool to the users through applets. It provides an interactive tool for the users to visualize the historical natural hazards exposure and damages in the areas of their interest, compute the resilience indices, and produce on-the-fly maps and statistics. The app could serve as a useful tool for decision makers. This app won the top 10 runners-up in the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Climate Resilience App Challenge 2014 and the top 5 in the scientific section of the ESRI Global Disaster App Challenge 2014.