The use of remote sensing for post-earthquake damage assessment: lessons from recent events, and future prospects as es ment: les ons from recent eve ts,

This paper discusses methods for the application of remote sensing in post earthquake damage assessment, and reports on a GEO-CAN crowd-sourcing study following the 22.2.2011 Christchurch event, and its validation using field studies. It describes the principal datasets used, discusses in detail the problems of validation, and considers the extent of omission and commission errors. It is clear that although commission errors in the GEO-CAN damage estimation are low, there are significant omission errors; but the precise extent of these is difficult to define, because of the nature of the datasets used. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving data collection for future investigations.