Mapping WarHow an OSU geographer helps us understand the world’s conflicts.

While the field of geography is often thought of as the study of spatial relationships, some geographers are as concerned with time as they are with space. Temporal change in places experiencing conflict or disaster, —and the reasons for that change — is what drives Associate Professor Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

Van Den Hoek and the Conflict Ecology lab that he leads use satellite imagery to characterize long-term, nationwide changes in conflict settings where it’s often too dangerous to collect information on the ground. He uses a combination of technologies to track the destruction of infrastructure, changes in land use related to conflict, and the movement of people — all with the goal of providing critical information to aid organizations and the media.

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.

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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 large-scale 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 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.

The Data Behind the Headlines: When major news outlets want to understand the devastating impact of war, they often turn to OSU’s Jamon Van Den Hoek and his Conflict Ecology lab. In the 2024 article “What Ukraine Has Lost,” The New York Times’ graphics editor Marco Hernandez and senior editor Tim Wallace created an arresting set of charts, using the lab’s data, that provided the first visualizations of the war’s destruction. “I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Jamon,” Hernandez said. “The work he does is exceptional and has made it possible to inform our readers not only about what is happening in Ukraine but in many other parts of the world, with an accuracy and efficiency that no one else has been able to achieve before.” Infographic by 2024 The New York Times company

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 most Western 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.

Van Den Hoek says the hardest impact to monitor is also the most important, and the one he cares about most deeply: the effects of conflicts on people. His approach can’t say whether there were people in a building when it was destroyed, or where survivors went after an attack. But his team is trying to track the migration of people in war zones and gain insights into what post-conflict life looks like for both refugees (people who leave their country due to disaster) and internally displaced people (those who leave home but stay within their own country’s borders).

There are half a dozen conflict areas in the world that should be getting more attention.

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“There’s a weight, a burden to this work. I want to do it in a way that’s helpful to others, and I recognize that it affects a lot of extremely vulnerable people,” he says.

“I think the continuing goal is to do this work in a rigorous way, with shareable outcomes that are relevant not to understanding the war per se but understanding how to lessen the harm on civilians.

“The global humanitarian system is in tatters right now, in the worst shape it’s been in for a long time. I’m hoping for a turning point and hoping that our work of the last couple of years can serve as an example of what can be done transparently and collaboratively.”