hotosm/venezuela_eq_2026

2026 Venezuela earthquake: AI building and damage assessment

AI-derived building footprints and building-level damage for the 24 June 2026 Venezuela earthquake, organized by area. Damage comes from up to three independent AI sources: HOTOSM fAIr (primary), Microsoft AI for Good Lab, and an OSU/CUNY Sentinel-1 radar product.

Interactive map: view it in map.

Building Damage Assessment Working Flow

fAIr detects building footprints on the pre-disaster image; the damage AI compares pre and post imagery. fAIr, Microsoft and OSU are fused on an H3 grid (more sources agreeing means higher confidence) and validated by MapSwipe volunteers. Per-building outputs are advisory; the H3 neighbourhood layers are the robust unit, and coverage is limited to where pre and post imagery overlap.

Areas

Area	Folder	Buildings	Destroyed	Major	Minor	Imagery
Caracas	caracas/	157,252	246	1,507	12,074	WorldView-3 (Vantor) 2026-06-26, ~0.34 m, TMS
La Guaira	la_guaira/	18,430	140	424	2,680	WorldView-3 (Vantor) 2026-06-26, ~0.34 m, TMS
Catia La Mar	catia_la_mar/	24,495	285	566	2,212	SkySat (Planet) 2026-06-27, ~0.5 m, TMS
Caraballeda	caraballeda/	5,366	59	64	311	SkySat (Planet) 2026-06-27, ~0.5 m, TMS
Naiguata	naiguata/	2,438	16	90	413	WorldView-3 (Vantor) 2026-06-27, ~0.33 m, TMS
Morón	moron/	12,369	75	188	719	Vantor LG05 2026-06-29, ~0.38 m, ESRI z18 pre

The dataset-level aoi.geojson indexes the areas assessed so far; each area folder also has its own aoi.geojson.

Notes

• Caracas: inland; damage is largely interior or soft-story and not visible from nadir, so the layer is a screening aid for human review.
• La Guaira: the validated product, cross-checked by a MapSwipe campaign and published on HDX.
• Catia La Mar, Caraballeda: coastal, on SkySat (~0.5 m) imagery.
• Naiguata: coastal, on very-high-resolution Vantor imagery.
• Morón: Carabobo coast, ~120 km west of the eastern cluster; Vantor post, ESRI z18 pre.

Status and validation

fAIr is the primary damage source for every area. Microsoft AI for Good Lab and the OSU/CUNY Sentinel-1 radar product are included where available. The columns show which sources cover each area and the validation status.

Area	fAIr	Microsoft	OSU	Human validated?	uMap published	MapSwipe	Data publication
Caracas	yes	no	assessed, none detected	in progress	yes	project	HF dataset
La Guaira	yes	yes	yes	Yes	yes	project	HDX
Catia La Mar	yes	yes	yes	in progress	No	project	HF dataset
Caraballeda	yes	yes	yes	in progress	No	project	HF dataset
Naiguata	yes	no	yes	No	No	none	HF dataset

Damage sources and where to find them

Inside each area's damage_assessment/, every source is provided as polygons, points and H3 cells:

• fair/ (primary): graded minor / major / destroyed.
• microsoft/: Microsoft AI for Good Lab, binary damaged, CC-BY 4.0.
• osu/: OSU/CUNY Sentinel-1 radar, binary damaged, experimental.
• combined/: fAIr and Microsoft merged for validation (H3 resolution-11), each cell tagged with which sources flag it. OSU is excluded from the combined layer (radar, not confirmable on optical imagery).
• validated/: human validation results where a campaign has run (e.g. validated/validated_mapswipe/), carrying a source column so future validation sources can be added. Currently La Guaira.

Cross-source agreement analysis: multisource_damage/.

fAIr models

• Buildings: dinov3s-buildings (DINOv3 ViT-S/16 encoder, UperNet decoder), trained on hotosm/vhr-building-segmentation.
• Damage: dinov3-damage-assessment (frozen DINOv3 ViT-L/16, UperNet decoder, ordinal 4-class head), trained on xBD / xView2.

License

fAIr damage predictions derive from a model trained on xBD (xView2), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so the fAIr damage layers inherit non-commercial share-alike terms. Imagery copyright Vantor Inc. 2026 (Caracas, La Guaira, Naiguata); Catia La Mar and Caraballeda imagery (c) 2026 Planet Labs PBC, CC BY-NC 4.0, via Source Cooperative.

External sources keep their own terms: Microsoft AI for Good Lab is CC-BY 4.0 (via HDX); the OSU/CUNY Sentinel-1 product is experimental and citation-required (Corey Scher, CUNY Graduate Center; Jamon Van Den Hoek, Oregon State University), using Overture Maps footprints (ODbL) and Copernicus Sentinel-1 data via ASF. See the source.json in each source folder.

Changelog

• v2 (2026-07-02) - refreshed counts across all areas after re-running the pipeline on land-clipped AOIs with the current pre-imagery composites; added Morón as the sixth area.
• v1 (2026-06-28) - initial release: Caracas, La Guaira, Catia La Mar, Caraballeda, Naiguatá.