Bram Valkenborg

ITS Inter- and Transdisciplinary Sessions

The 2025 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Bram Valkenborg for the poster/PICO entitled:

A multilingual tool for the documentation of impactful geo-hydrological hazards using online news articles: a worldwide application (Valkenborg, B.; Dewitte, O.; Smets, B.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Bram Valkenborg, a PhD researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Royal Museum for Central Africa, studies the detection of geo-hydrological hazards by combining an innovative text mining approach with advanced remote sensing techniques. His work aims to both improve hazard documentation in data-scarce regions such as Central Africa and enhance our understanding of their spatiotemporal distribution.

At the EGU General Assembly 2025, Bram introduced HazMiner, a text mining tool that automatically extracts the location, timing, and impact of geo-hydrological hazard events worldwide. HazMiner processes online news articles in 58 languages using large language models. Its paragraph-based approach enabled the identification of 21,964 hazard events from the analysis of 2.7 million news articles published between 2020 and 2023.

Looking ahead, Bram’s research will focus on creating synergies between HazMiner and satellite-based hazard detection and mapping. This integration will help further characterize hazardous events and assess their impacts on land use and land cover.