Organised Editing/Activities/Myanmar Earthquake 2025

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General Information
Logo. Myanmar Earthquake 2025
https://www.hotosm.org/
Description
Building damaged during the 2025 Myanmar Earthquake in Mandalay
Coordination:

Open Mapping Hub Asia Pacific, MyOSM

Partners:

Undisclosed

Hashtag: #help-mm-earthquake

Campaign: Myanmar Earthquake 2025

Time-frame:

28 Mar 2025 - TBC
Data

HDX OSM Myanmar datasets (updated daily)

Context of the Activation

On March 28, 2025, a devastating shallow 7.7-magnitude earthquake with its epicenter near Mandalay struck central Myanmar, causing widespread destruction, especially along the geological fault line running in a north-south direction across the country. Large areas, including major cities such as Mandalay, Sagaing, and Naypyidaw, were severely affected. This disaster strikes amid an already dire situation for the people of Myanmar, who have been enduring the ongoing civil war since 2021.

The full extent of the damage and loss of life is not yet clear, but it is feared that the casualty numbers could rise into the thousands. Furthermore, infrastructure has suffered massive damage, with many buildings and bridges collapsing and roads being severely impacted.

In response to this tragedy, myOSM – Myanmar’s OpenStreetMap Community is launched a mapping initiative to support humanitarian efforts and is calling for your help. Our goal is to provide essential mapping data to local responders, helping them plan and coordinate both immediate emergency relief and long-term reconstruction efforts.

To see the spatial extent of the projects in HOT's Tasking Manager, please visit this 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 bernard.heng@hotosm.org 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: #help-mm-earthquake

ohsomeNow Stats page for tracking overall contributions

Timeline

  • Start: 28 Mar 2025
  • End: TBC

Map and Data Services

Accessing OpenStreetMap data

For wide area downloads use the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), this is being updated daily from the latest OSM data. See the filtered HDX list of OSM exports for Myanmar.

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

To access all MapSwipe results for Myanmar (i.e. where at least three humans look at each piece of satellite imagery to detect built up areas) visit this HDX page.

Overture data

OSM building footprints mapped and validated during the earthquake response (light red) compared with machine mapped Overture building footprints (bright pink) in Mandalay, Myanmar.

Overture data (which is open for use under the Community Database License Agreement – Permissive v2) includes a mix of OSM buildings and machine mapped Google and Microsoft buildings. You can explore and locally download the global Overture dataset here. The Overture dataset only updates to the latest OSM data on a roughly monthly basis (check the last update date here). Therefore, any digitization that is taking place right now on OSM as part of this response will not be present in the Overture dataset until a future update.

Soon after the earthquake, Overture added their building footprints for Myanmar to HDX. Although coverage of this dataset may be much higher than OSM alone for Myanmar, in densely built environments like Mandalay the accuracy and completeness of machine mapped footprints can be lower than manually mapped footprints on OSM. The GIF on the right-hand side compares recently mapped and validated OSM buildings in Mandalay versus machine mapped Overture buildings.

In addition, in rural areas of Myanmar the Overture buildings dataset does not include a large number of settlements that can easily be seen on satellite imagery. On comparing the results from the first Myanmar Earthquake MapSwipe project (where at least three humans look at each piece of satellite imagery to detect built up areas), with the Overture buildings dataset it was found that around one third of the settlements and building clusters in rural areas of Myanmar are not present in the Overture dataset.

Other relevant resources

General

Remote sensing / imagery

About This Disaster Activation

About HOT

Hot logo with text.svg

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

  • 28 Mar 2025: At 12:50:52 MMT (06:20:52 UTC), a Mw 7.7 earthquake struck the Sagaing Region of Myanmar, with an epicenter close to Mandalay
  • 28 Mar 2025: Size-up completed by Bernard Heng
  • 28 Mar 2025: First MapSwipe project launched
  • 28 Mar 2025: Post-quake images released by Maxar (here, here and on GitHub for programatic download)
  • 29 Mar 2025: First Tasking Manager project published by local community MyOSM
  • 30 Mar 2025: Data ethics and protection assessment completed by HOT
  • 31 Mar 2025: First MapSwipe project completed and results generated here
  • 2 April 2025: Second MapSwipe project publised focusing on rural area Pyinoolwin Township
  • 16 April 2025: MapSwipe results from first seven projects combined and published to HDX

Data Quality

Validation

Validation permissions for Tasking Manager projects are restricted to users with intermediate+ status (more than 250 changesets) that are in the following Tasking Manager teams:

myOSM Validator Team, HOT Global Validators, Data Quality Interns , Validator Trainees, Data quality Interns 2022, MSF Validators, OMDTZ Validators, OSM Africa Validators, UN Mappers Building Validators, UN Mappers Topographic Validators, UN Mappers validation candidates, AP Hub's Guru - Validator

For Mappers

How You Can Contribute

MapSwipe

Go to https://web.mapswipe.org/#/en and look for a Myanmar Earthquake project. This is a very easy way to contribute, but please follow the tutorial if you have not used MapSwipe before. First MapSwipe project completed and results generated here

Learn to Map

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

Mapping Priority

  • Please choose from highest priority first.
  • We call for local mappers to prioritize local knowledge on the area.

Tasking Manager

HOT Tasking Manager projects and their progress can be seen here. For any projects that are marked 'Published', select the link in the Project ID column and it will launch the project and you will be able to contribute.

Mapping Instructions

Maxar's post earthquake Myanmar imagery has been added to OpenAerialMap and Tasking Manager projects which intersect this imagery had the following instructions added:

This HOT Task now uses 2025-03-31 (new post-earthquake) imagery) made available by Maxar Open Data Progam. Damaged and collapsed buildings If you see damaged and collapsed buildings, please also map them as buildings. If you want, you can map those with the OSM tags building=damaged - for damaged buildings building=collapsed - for complete collapsed buildings which will help OSM users to identify damaged buildings. Damaged buildings crisis mapping

To see these damage mapping instructions in context see this project's instructions.

  • For remote mapping of buildings via HOT's Tasking Manager, see here
  • For remote mapping of roads via HOT's Tasking Manager, see here
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