The integration of nautical hazard assessment and harbor GIS models to the Taichung Port area in Taiwan

Human hazards can represent a significant risk to the population and cause huge economic damage in many urbanized regions. In order to be able to identify risk hot spots and implement targeted risk reduction measures, decision makers need to have a clear picture of the risk situation in their countries or regions. This work reviews existing approaches for human hazard and risk assessment, and geographic information system–based statistical tools are employed to analyze the hazard cases which happened within the Taichung Port area from 2000 to 2010. Based on hazard analysis, we establish a seasonal digital map and calculate the center of the distribution of hazard cases and the standard distance and observe the distribution trend. We also identify the hazard cases’ gathering mode by the average nearest neighbor method. Finally, hot spot analysis is proposed to assess the position and features of hot and cold spots, as a reference for coast guard patrols. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013