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Abstract Building community resilience has become a national imperative. Substantial uncertainties in dynamic environments of emergencies and crises require real‐time information collection and dissemination based on big data analytics. These, in turn, require networked communities and cross‐sector partnerships to build lasting resilience. This viewpoint article highlights an interdisciplinary approach to building community resilience through community‐engaged research and partnerships. This perspective leverages existing community partnerships and network resources, undertakes an all‐hazard and whole‐community approach, and evaluates the use of state‐of‐the‐art information communication technologies. In doing so, it reinforces the multifaceted intergovernmental and cross‐sector networks through which resilience can be developed and sustained. 

The study of migrations and mobility has historically been severely limited by the absence of reliable data or the temporal sparsity of available data. Using geospatial digital trace data, the study of population movements can be much more precisely and dynamically measured. Our research seeks to develop a near real-time (one-day lag) Twitter census that gives a more temporally granular picture of local and non-local population at the county level. Internal validation reveals over 80% accuracy when compared with users’ self-reported home location. External validation results suggest these stocks correlate with available statistics of residents/non-residents at the county level and can accurately reflect regular (seasonal tourism) and non-regular events such as the Great American Solar Eclipse of 2017. The findings demonstrate that Twitter holds the potential to introduce the dynamic component often lacking in population estimates. This study could potentially benefit various fields such as demography, tourism, emergency management, and public health and create new opportunities for large-scale mobility analyses.