Tarps are data, writes Nigel Snoad in his blog From the Edges In:
I was reading (as you do) the Rochester Institute of Technology pages on Haiti geodata and disaster-risk analysis and noted a side-project: the Blue Tarp Detection Scheme, where Dr Dave Messinger used remote sensing and spectral analysis to detect and plot the locations of blue tarps. As anyone who has flown over a disaster zone or IDP camp knows plastic sheeting/tarpaulins/tarps have high contrast and are handed out during emergencies, so in many ways they make a find proxy for the presence of displaced populations, and possibly for the movement or change in these populations. I’d love to see more analysis of this as there are a number of factors that would affect a tarp count as a reliable indicator, including age, presence of temporary shelters before an emergency, the use of tarps for something other than shelter, and also the market that rapidly springs up around these products where they’re traded for cash and other goods. Nonetheless I’d expect that you could control for much of this, and generate some pretty interesting data. After a quick Google search I couldn’t find any papers that explored this use of remotes sensing which surprises me, I expect I’m just looking in the wrong place.