For this week’s exercise, we are putting the focus on ‘citizen science’ and ‘crowd-sourcing’ initiatives, in relation to environmental monitoring and disaster response.

Rather than a specific guided exercises, we’d like to encourage you this week to freely explore the initiatives and tools listed below. Compare the different approaches used, and try to assess which ones you feel make an effective contribution in their respective areas.

Once you have done this, you can share your thoughts in the discussion area below, perhaps suggesting other potential applications of these sorts of tools.

‘Citizen Science’ is an umbrella term used to describe projects with scientific or other research goals in which the general public can get involved, either by engaging in simple ‘micro-tasking’ online, or by running software on their local computer which feeds into a central system. ‘Crowd-sourcing’ is a more general term used to describe the involvement of a ‘crowd’ (again typically the general public) in providing or sorting through small pieces of information or conducting small tasks, to help solve a bigger problem.

In recent years, citizen science and crowd-sourcing have become important tools in disaster relief and humanitarian contexts. Projects such as Humanitarian Open Street Map, and initiatives utilising social media to tag maps and aerial images with key information or changes to infrastructure or the landscape, have become a vital part of the toolset for first responders, NGOs and international agencies.

As the availability of high quality satellite data has increased, it is now becoming possible to use satellite imagery in this way, with members of the public quickly sifting through large numbers of images to classify and tag them in the aftermath of major events. Such tools can also be used for less time-critical environmental matters too.

Here are some of the suggested sites to explore:

Map Swipe - a new initiative enabling fast classification of images from mobile phones

Picture Pile - used for classifying environmental change

Planetary Response Network - a pilot initiative run during the time of the Ecuador earthquake in April 2016, as part of the ESA Crowd4Sat initiative. (Currently de-activated, but information and example data is still available on the site).

Citizen Cyber Lab - linked to UNOSAT

Take the end of week test

You can take the end of week test by clicking on the test button located on the top-right.