Earthquakes and story maps

Abstract

Since 2013, the Earthquake Department of INGV has used story maps as a new communication and information channel on seismicity and seismic risk of the national territory. Numerous story maps have been developed to tell the various aspects of the earthquakes that have struck in the past, and in recent years, our country by integrating descriptive, photographic and multimedia information with georeferenced data from the INGV seismological and seismotectonic databases [Pignone , 2015]. A story maps is an integrated set of digital maps, related content (legend, text, photos, videos, etc.) and interaction features (pan / zoom, pop-up, query, select, etc.) that make it an easily understandable and an immediate information and communication product. For this reason, they have also become a very valid tool in the dissemination events that INGV promotes using touch screens that allow you to create real exhibits with which to interact with the public, demonstrating the potential of geographic information in risk communication. After the creation of the story maps, it was decided to also use the web applications of the dashboards type that allow you to make various tools for viewing the datasets and related attributes available, in order to create simple infographics, very effective for communication and information for inexperienced users. ESRI ArcGIS online technology (https://www.arcgis.com/) was used to create story maps and dashboard, a cloud-based sharing platform that allows you to build web maps by integrating your datasets with a rich collection of basic geographic data with worldwide coverage. With these web maps it is possible to create, using appropriate templates available, different types of web applications, publish them and share them on the web. From 2013 to today, over 25 story maps and dashboards have been published to tell about some of the most important earthquakes and tsunamis of the past in Italy and the Mediterranean but also to analyze some of the recent seismic sequences that have affected the Italian territory. There were about 110 thousand views of the story maps and dashboards published (Fig. 1).