Review article: Social media for managing disasters triggered by natural hazards: a critical review of data collection strategies and actionable insights

This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of 250 studies published between January 2010 and September 2023 that examine how social media data have been used to manage disasters triggered by natural hazards. The review focuses on data collection, processing, and analysis strategies, and evaluates their effectiveness in transforming social media content into actionable information for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.

A Social Media Literature Database (SMLD) was developed to support this analysis, categorising each study into seven main categories and 27 subcategories covering (a) article details, (b) case study regions, (c) disaster events, (d) social media platforms, (e) data characteristics, (f) collection and analysis methods, and (g) evaluation approaches. The reviewed literature encompasses disasters resulting from a wide range of natural hazards, most frequently floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, but also including storms, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, landslides, droughts, and multi-hazard events.