9:30 AM - 9:45 AM
[G01-03] Toward Sustainable Earthquake Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Project: Interdisciplinary Seismological Research Design
Keywords:sustainable, disaster prevention, disaster reduction, interdisciplinary, fusion of fields, outreach
One of the most important issues in sustaining projects related to earthquake disaster prevention and mitigation is securing the human resources involved in the project. For example, Kim Laboratory in Yokohama City University is promoting a project to construct a low-cost citizen seismograph network in Yokohama city, but in order to continue this project, it is necessary to secure personnel continuously in various fields, such as device and data management, server maintenance, and data analysis. And it is highly risky to employ them for that purpose with temporary funds or covered by students in the laboratory. Therefore, we proposed the following idea as a way to continuously secure personnel for such a project that must be sustained. First of all, we assume the situation is a laboratory within a university has launched a project to operate a sustainable seismograph network in the region. There are students from various backgrounds and specialties within the university. We try to make the project operation sustainable by informing students who do not specialize in seismology about the project, broadening their interest in the project, and encouraging their participation from various perspectives. As one of the ideas, we held an idea competition for the utilization of data acquired by seismographs to invent new use cases of seismic data, deepen interest in seismology and disaster prevention, and promote participation in the research. Participants were not required to have any knowledge of earthquakes, and only minimal information such as the significance of a seismograph sensor network and installation conditions were disclosed to them, encouraging them to come up with their own ideas. The data utilization ideas were not limited to those in the field of seismology, but were encouraged to be integrated with knowledge from other fields, such as informatics and business administration. We designed a cycle of raising awareness of the seismograph network throughout the university and to attract non-specialized students and faculty members to seismological research by holding this idea competition continuously. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of our seismic network project, how it was advertized in the university, the contents of the idea competition, how the competition was run, the results, and examples of ideas from other fields that were actually added to our seismic network project.