It is my honor to receive the JDR Award for the Most Cited Paper 2022. I would sincerely like to thank the JDR editorial office, reviewers, and my co-author, Professor Yamazaki, for their support.

The paper that received this honor was “Extraction of Collapsed Buildings in the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake Using Multi-Temporal PALSAR-2 Data.” In this work, we proposed three change indices for evaluating the damage to buildings in Mashiki Town, Kumamoto Prefecture that were severely affected by the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake. The indices were calculated from two pre- and one co-event ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 images. The most valid factor was adopted by comparing the extracted results with the reference data from field surveys. The factor was then applied to larger affected areas of Kumamoto City and its surroundings. In this work, the ALOS-2 proved to very effective in recognizing damages caused by nature disasters.

This work has been cited by 21 journal papers as of December 2022. I am grateful to the editorial board of the JDR for affording us the opportunity to have this work published. We hope our results in this paper will help even more scientific works. Encouraged by this award, we will continue to conduct future investigations to further disaster prevention and management.