
Abstract Access to detailed war impact assessments is crucial for humanitarian organizations to assist affected populations effectively. However, maintaining a comprehensive understanding of the situation on the ground is challenging, especially in widespread and prolonged conflicts. Here, we present a scalable method for estimating building damage resulting from armed conflicts. By training a machine learning model on Synthetic Aperture Radar image time series, we generate probabilistic damage estimates at the building level, leveraging existing damage assessments and open building footprints. To allow large-scale inference and ensure accessibility, we tie our method to run on Google Earth Engine. Users can adjust confidence intervals to suit their needs, enabling rapid and flexible assessments of war-related damage across large areas. We provide two publicly accessible dashboards: a Ukraine Damage Explorer to dynamically view our precomputed estimates and a Rapid Damage Mapping Tool to run our method and generate custom maps.
2300 General Environmental Science, Environmental sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences, QE1-996.5, 11555 Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV), 320 Political science, 1900 General Earth and Planetary Sciences, Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 10113 Institute of Political Science, Geology, GE1-350
2300 General Environmental Science, Environmental sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences, QE1-996.5, 11555 Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV), 320 Political science, 1900 General Earth and Planetary Sciences, Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 10113 Institute of Political Science, Geology, GE1-350
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 8 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% |
