Resolving past natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides, and volcano eruptions is of great importance for understating the impact they had, the mechanism of their occurrence, and the potential hazard they posed on the living societies worldwide. Additionally, assessing the long-term risk and hazard contribute significantly for the preparedness and mitigation actions being held towards such future events. Traditionally, past events were and still are examined using the interpretation of various sources such historical accounts, natural evidence, botanical findings and archaeological remains. However, the integration and combined analysis of such sources is rather complex whereas their origin, nature, type, accuracy, and completeness are substantially different from each other and occasionally requires interdisciplinary cooperation and high proficiency the scholars on the one hand and suitable scientific framework of integration on the other hand. In the last few decades GIS has developed rapidly and significantly and to date, can serve as an integrating framework for a wide range of scientific disciplines. Furthermore, the evolving GIScience and remote sensing approaches provide rich qualitative and quantitative capabilities for inspecting and modeling spatial phenomena and are being constantly developed for the study of natural hazards.

In this session we cordially invite presentations of original studies and reviews aimed at using the GIS framework as well GIScience and remote sensing approaches for the study of past natural hazards. The historical time frame of the occurrence of the events contains both instrumental and pre-instrumental periods. Potential themes may include but are not limited to the following topics:

• Innovative GIScience methodologies for interpreting and analyzing past scenarios such earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, floods, landslides, and volcano eruptions worldwide
• Temporal and spatial pattern characterization of the occurrences of past natural hazards
• Remote sensing and GIScience for assessing the past vulnerability to natural hazards, the risk, and the resulted hazard
• Describing the short- and long-term impact natural hazards had in the past on the living societies
• Developing GIS-based simulation and 3D models for better characterization of cascading events and their resulted damage.
• Quantitative and qualitative spatial approaches for measuring the intense and severity of events as well as coupling the effects of past disasters

• ASPRS: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing -
• CGU: Canadian Geophysical Union -
• EGU: European Geosciences Union -
• GSA: Geological Society of America -