A geospatial dataset of urban infrastructure for emergency response in Portugal

Emergency response plays a critical role in mitigating the impact of disasters and ensuring public safety. Understanding a city's capability for emergency response is vital for effective disaster management and urban planning. This paper describes a comprehensive geospatial dataset that assesses the emergency response capability of cities in Portugal based on their urban infrastructure, accounting for the number of hospitals, police stations, fire department units, and metro/railway stations. These infrastructures are essential for attending to victims, mitigating emergency situations, and performing rescue operations. Besides that, the GeoJSON definitions of all Portuguese cities are also provided in the dataset, which were used to compute the number of the target facilities based on data from OpenStreetMap. The potential applications of this dataset are numerous, ranging from urban planning and resource allocation to disaster response strategy development. Moreover, it indicates where public investments are most required, especially when combined with others continuously updated public datasets with incidents in urban areas. (c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Automated summary

Emergency response plays a critical role in mitigating the impact of disasters and ensuring public safety. This study assesses the emergency response capability of cities in Portugal using a comprehensive geospatial dataset, considering various urban infrastructures and the number of metro/railway stations. The dataset has potential applications in urban planning, resource allocation, and disaster response strategy development.