We are very pleased to publish this Special Issue, NIED Frontier Research on Science and Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience 2023, which includes three papers and one tutorial.

The first paper, authored by Dhakal and Kunugi, presents the orientation changes that earthquake movements have caused in the accelerometers of a seafloor observation network for earthquakes and tsunamis along the Japan Trench (S-net). This study is expected to contribute to more accurate analyses of S-net data. The second and third papers are reports of research done on volcanoes. The paper by Tanada and Ueda presents the seismic activity of the Nasudake volcano through the use of NIED hypocenter data gathered from 1998 to 2022. Tanada and Ueda state that earthquakes have regularly occurred near the Chausudake lava dome and two craters and that, from the volcano disaster-prevention point of view, it is important to monitor the relationship between this seismic area and volcanic activity. The third paper, by Miyagi et al., reports on an experiment aimed at grasping the movement of climbers and sharing the level of disaster threat with climber-related organizations in real time. Their online visualization system for the movement of climbers helps to provide solutions to problems related to volcanic disaster prevention not only during disaster events but also in the periods between. The last paper is a tutorial by Hanashima and Usuda on “SIP4D-ZIP,” which is a standard for synthesizing and sharing common information from multiple organizations. This tutorial explains how to realize a versatile and automatic mutual data sharing and usage system for various kinds of necessary disaster information.

In conjunction with the fourth 7-year mid/long term plan period 2016-2022, NIED has published seven special issues since 2017, including this 2023 issue. We believe that the articles in these seven issues can contribute to the advancement of science and technology for disaster risk reduction and resilience.