Integrating drones into disaster town watching: Participatory action data collection of local knowledge in Tuguegarao City, Philippines

Disaster town watching comprises a participatory technique by a community to observe, identify, understand, and build resilience to natural or human-induced hazards. Participants walk through their communities, taking notes and imagery for subsequent participatory risk mapping exercises. The goal is to develop a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the community's state of disaster risk management. This article explores the integration of drones in the acquisition of imagery for disaster town watching. It followed standard practices for conducting disaster town watching research in a community in the Philippines. However, in addition to standard walking teams, one team learned to pilot drone missions, take aerial images, and then interpret them. The imagery they produced elicited more spatially significant relationships between and across features and locations in the community. The types of local knowledge identified differed significantly from that taken from images produced with cellular phones or Google Earth. This study revealed that drone imagery can provide new insights into local knowledge on hazards, vulnerability, and resources and the enhancement of social, economic, and environmental resilience it engenders. Participants build greater confidence in their ability to determine self-help solutions and mutual help countermeasures for enhancing disaster preparedness and community resilience against disaster.