20 OregonStater.org R E S E AR C H Much of what the world knows about the progression of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is due to the work of Van Den Hoek and his team: The maps they have created have been staples of wartime reporting in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio and other outlets. What does war look like from space? Van Den Hoek and his team look at a range of changes, such as the destruction of buildings and roads in urban settings, loss or abandonment of agriculture and the establishment of refugee settlements. “Increasingly we’re looking at other signals, too, like atmospheric conditions, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions attributable to largescale war, smoke signals and more,” he says. It’s the integration of these disparate techniques and tools that truly helps Van Den Hoek understand the progress of conflict rather than just its footprint. “We consider ourselves to be conducting conflict-engaged, rather than simply conflict-aware, work,” he explains. While a conflict-aware project might look at a single parameter in a conflict zone, like deforestation, and MUCH OF WHAT THE WORLD KNOWS ABOUT THE PROGRESSION OF THE WARS IN UKRAINE AND GAZA IS DUE TO THE WORK OF VAN DEN HOEK AND HIS TEAM. attribute that change to the conflict, his approach engages more deeply in understanding the damage patterns that result from more specific factors like changes in territorial control. He explains that the difference lies in using a suite of complementary approaches to study change, and linking that data to other kinds of information, including mainstream and social media reports, the history of the conflict area, troop deployment information and any data that can be collected on the ground. The study of urban conflict areas is challenging, but in some ways it is a little easier than looking at change in other types of landscapes. All studies of change need a baseline, and Van Den Hoek explains that he “exploits the fact that cities tend to look largely the same year after year,” as opposed to agricultural areas that change seasonally and over spans of years. With a solid baseline drawn from pre-war records, Van Den Hoek and his team examine images of urban conflict and look for building damage using a kind of open-source radar imagery captured weekly by the European Space Agency. This imaging, taken from a side angle rather than strictly from above (like the imagery used by Google or Apple Maps), detects the loss of buildings as well as changes like scorch marks that might indicate internal damage. Review of the imagery is automated using algorithms written and updated by Van Den Hoek and his team; results of their analyses for urban areas include numbers and percentages of buildings damaged. Each new analysis of changes in Gaza, Ukraine or elsewhere is sent to Van Den Hoek’s list of hundreds of media contacts and non-governmental and aid organizations, who use it to inform the world and, when possible, to take humanitarian action. His lab’s work has revealed that nearly 200,000 buildings have been destroyed so far in Gaza, and twice that many have been destroyed in Ukraine. While Gaza and Ukraine garner the mostWestern media attention,Van Den Hoek would like his work to raise awareness of lesser-known but similarly destructive conflicts, too. “There are half a dozen conflict areas in the world that should be getting more attention. Sudan, for example, has for months been identified as the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis,” he says. continued
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