Organised Editing/Activities/Afghanistan Earthquake 2025

From OpenStreetMap Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
General Information
Logo. Afghanistan Earthquake 2025
https://www.hotosm.org/
Description
ECHO Daily Map of 1 September 2025
Coordination:

Open Mapping Hub Asia Pacific

Partners:

International organization responding on ground (cannot disclose name for now)

Hashtag: #AfghanistanEQ2025

Campaign: Afghanistan Earthquake 2025

Time-frame:

2 Sep 2025 - 7 Oct 2025
Data

HDX Afghanistan OSM datasets

Context of the Activation

On 31 August 2025, at 23:47 AFT (19:17 UTC), a Mw 6.0 earthquake struck Nangarhar and Kunar provinces in Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Several geological and structural factors led to a heavy impact for the earthquake's relatively moderate size, with around 3,000 deaths, 4,000 injuries and 8,000 collapsed homes; almost all of the casualties and destruction occurred in five districts of Kunar Province, where almost all buildings were damaged or destroyed, with nearby provinces also suffering damage and casualties. It was the deadliest earthquake to affect Afghanistan since 1998. (Source: Wiki)

At the time of the incident the area was relatively under-mapped for roads and buildings on OSM. An exception to this was due to a completely mapped Tasking Manager project from late 2020 focusing on mapping buildings in Jalalabad District and the western more urban areas of Behsud District which ensured that those regions are already well mapped. To see the full spatial extent of the coordinated mapping activities in this response please refer to this interactive uMap.

Contacts

If you are part of an organization or community involved in the response and have OSM data needs, please reach out to Bernard Heng [email protected] to share your priority locations and/or features for mapping.

Hashtag

All contributions through HOT's Tasking Manager are tracked with a unique change set comment tag: #AfghanistanEQ2025

ohsomeNow Stats page for tracking overall contributions

Timeline

  • Start: 2 September 2025
  • End: 7 October 2025

Map and Data Services

Accessing OpenStreetMap data

For wide area downloads use the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), see HDX Afghanistan OSM datasets.

For more targeted downloads: from a Tasking Manager project page, scroll down to the 'Download OSM Data' section once the project is 100% complete.

Prioritization

Figure 1: MapSwipe boundary (red) and epicentre (red star). Map data from OSM, OCHA, USGS.

The areas within the USGS Very Strong EQ VI Zone are being prioritized for mapping.

Buildings

North of the Kabul River is rural and so MapSwipe was used to locate buildings before mapping in OSM. The first MapSwipe project boundary (red boundary in figure 1) was created by clipping the Very Strong EQ VI Zone against OCHA ADM2 Districts which are north of the Kabul River.

Districts south of the Kabul River in the Strong VI earthquake zone (southern blue area in image) are relatively densely populated and are therefore not worth MapSwiping. They will be used to directly create Tasking Manager projects based on (1) Prioritized locations from organizations/community (2) Proximity to the epicentre (3) Lack of OSM data.

Roads

HOT is in touch with an international organization responding on the ground to hear their needs. They shared that coordinated OSM road mapping would support their teams in getting to remote villages and that the road axis in between Jalalbad to Asadabad should be the initial focus. Road mapping projects will therefore focus on the Districts between Jalalbad and Asadabad, starting with Kama District.

AI and OSM building footprint comparison

Figure 2: Area of assessment (black) and Overture + Microsoft footprints (blue), areas only covered by Microsoft in purple, OSM footprints (green).

This analysis is based on a pilot workflow that compares building footprints datasets using a sample of 70 buildings. The goal of this evaluation is to develop statistically significant quality metrics that can be used to assess the accuracy and consistency of the datasets.

The assessment boundary uses the first MapSwipe project extent which was created by clipping the Very Strong EQ VI Zone against OCHA ADM2 Districts which are north of the Kabul River. It was run on 4 September 2025:

Dataset Last Update Building count Missing Buildings* Shape accuracy Misidentified buildings Footprint area (km2) Area compared
OpenStreetMap (OSM) 2025-09-03 491 99% 52% 8% 0.06513900 0.52%
Google Open Buildings Unknown 39 100% Unknown Unknown 0.00156200 0.01%
Microsoft Building Footprints 2025-02-28 92,895 0% 81% 3% 12.47218000 100%
Overture Maps 2025-07-23 90,700 2% 80% 3% 11.93670500 95.71%

The exercise will be repeated in the future, contingent upon two conditions: (1) the area has been thoroughly mapped by OpenStreetMap (OSM) volunteers, and (2) other building footprint datasets have received updates. The data was extracted using Open Buildings Extractor (OBE).

* Missing Buildings is measured by assessing the number of buildings that a particular dataset is missing against various imagery sources (typically Bing and Esri). It is calculated using the following formula: (missing buildings / sample size).

AI and MapSwipe building comparisons

Figure 3: MapSwipe polygons (white) vs Microsoft Buildings (red) and where they intersect (yellow)

For the Afghanistan MapSwipe project that was completed on Thursday 4 September: Intersecting MapSwipe polygons (white in figure 3) with Microsoft AI buildings (red in figure 3) shows a relatively high level of completeness from Microsoft, 89% of the MapSwipe polygons (yellow in figure 3) have Microsoft buildings in them. As a reminder, MapSwipe only generates results where a majority of three humans using the app agree that there are buildings in a satellite imagery tile.

Figure 4: Microsoft buildings (pink) falling outside of MapSwipe polygons (white)

Running a selection of Microsoft buildings that fall outside of the MapSwipe polygons (i.e. disjoint in QGIS) returns only 1,586 Microsoft AI buildings from a total of 92,895. Which means that only 1.7% of the Microsoft buildings fall outside (purple dots in figure 4) of the MapSwipe polygons. Zooming into some of these, some Microsoft buildings are false positives, that can't be seen in any imagery or are clearly boulders misidentified as buildings, and some are buildings that were missed by MapSwipe volunteers.

Other relevant resources

About This Disaster Activation

About HOT

To learn more about the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), explore more of our wiki-pages (root: HOT) or our website hotosm.org. HOT is a global community, mostly of volunteers, and it is a US registered nonprofit able to contract with organizations (email info at hotosm.org to contact our staff), we are also a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

History of this Activation

Since the initial activation, our community has provided valuable mapping support to aid humanitarian efforts, and we are immensely grateful for the dedicated of our volunteers. As of 7 October 2025, HOT has concluded the current mapping activation for Afghanistan. HOT remains ready to re-activate our efforts. We will continue to monitor the situation closely, and new information or defined requirements from humanitarian partners will swiftly inform decision to resume dedicated support.

  • 31 Aug 2025: at 23:47 local time (19:17 UTC), a Mw 6.0 earthquake struck Nangarhar and Kunar provinces in Afghanistan
  • 2 Sep 2025: Size-up completed by Bernard Heng
  • 2 Sep 2025: Direct contact with OSM Afghanistan community established by Mikko Tamura
  • 2 Sep 2025: First MapSwipe project published
  • 2 Sep 2025: Posted on response in OSM Community Forum
  • 3 Sep 2025: HOT's Ethical Data and Protection tool signed off to approve remote mapping in the region
  • 3 Sep 2025: First HOT Tasking Manager project published, focusing on mapping buildings in Behsud District
  • 3 Sep 2025: Second HOT Tasking Manager project published, focused on mapping roads in Kama District
  • 4 Sep 2025: AI and OSM building footprint comparison conducted (see section above)
  • 4 Sep 2025: First MapSwipe project completed
  • 7 Sep 2025: Second published Tasking Manager project focused on mapping roads in Kama District was completed
  • 8 Sep 2025: Third HOT Tasking Manager project published, focusing on mapping roads in Kuz Kunar District
  • 16 Sep 2025: Third HOT Tasking Manager project focused on mapping roads in Kuz Kunar District was completed
  • 29 Sep 2025: Main data requestor (international organization responding on ground) confirmed no more OSM mapping needs in Afghanistan
  • 6 Oct 2025: First HOT Tasking Manager focused on mapping buildings in Behsud District archived after being fully mapped and validated

Data Quality

Validation

Validation permissions for Tasking Manager projects is restricted to users with intermediate+ status (more than 250 changesets) that are part of certain validation teams. Teams are groups of OSM users that have been granted permission to join a team based on their experience.

For Mappers

How You Can Contribute

Learn to Map

  • Most of our volunteer needs are for remote OSM contributors, visit LearnOSM.org to get started.

MapSwipe

Tasking Manager

HOT Tasking Manager projects and their progress can be seen here: Afghanistan Earthquake 2025. For any projects that are marked 'Published', select to launch a project and you will be able to contribute.

Mapping Instructions

Retrieved from "https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Organised_Editing/Activities/Afghanistan_Earthquake_2025&oldid=2916159"