Nighttime Lights in Conflict

Data and code for our work on assessing the use of nighttime lights as a tool to measure conflict in Yemen and Ukraine.

Working paper title: Nighttime lights as a proxy for conflict intensity, population displacement, and infrastructure recovery in Yemen and Ukraine

Maia C. Tarnas^1*, Tetyana I. Vasylyeva^1,2, Volodymyr M. Minin³, Daniel M. Parker^1,2

1. Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention, University of California, Irvine
2. Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California, Irvine
3. Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine

• Corresponding author: mtarnas@uci.edu

Information on Data

This study uses data collected from several sources.

Nighttime lights: NASA Black Marble, extracted using blackmarbleR package

Attacks: Yemen Data Project (Yemen) and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Ukraine)

Population: WorldPop

Built environment: Sentinel-2 Dynamic World, extracted using Google Earth Engine

Diesel: World Food Programme via Humanitarian Data Exchange

Data used in the cholera case study can be found in the original paper's GitHub

A note on code

Any text within [square brackets] will need to be replaced with individual user's information