Crowdsourcing 'nodders' help spot illegal fires in Indonesia

Jewel Topsfield Sydney Morning Herald 17 Oct 15;

Jakarta: This time Jimmy Liew has a personal reason for being part of an invisible global army of geo-geeks dedicated to … well, saving the world.

During work hours Mr Liew is a freelance project manager. In his own time, he spends countless hours poring over satellite maps, searching for wrongdoers.

From his home in Singapore, Mr Liew has spotted illegal fishing weirs wreaking havoc on the native fish population in the Persian Gulf and identified damaged homes and roads after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal.

But it is his most recent campaign that is particularly close to his heart – documenting the location of illegal fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan that cause the choking haze in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia every year.

The haze is caused by fires, which are often lit to clear land for palm oil and acacia plantations.

Mr Liew is a "nodder", as they call themselves, a volunteer who searches satellite imagery on crowdsourcing website Tomnod and tags information that may be of use in disaster rescue efforts or to prosecute offenders.

In the most recent campaign Mr Liew has been involved in, Indonesia: Illegal burning, for example, nodders are asked to tag every fire and burn scar they see on the geospatial images.

His motivation to nod comes from a basic desire to do good, although he admits the illegal burning campaign in Indonesia is personal.

"I have two young boys and they get respiratory illnesses whenever haze occurs. So it does matter to me."

At last count, he's combed 3.86 kilometres of map areas and spotted 83 "suspected points". "Hopefully by spotting [the fires and burn scars] it might help whoever they are providing the data to, to do something about it."

Tomnod, which means "Big Eye" in Mongolian, began as a start-up funded by engineering alumni from the University of California, San Diego, and was originally designed to find the tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia. It is best known for its role in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370, when 8 million people looked for plane wreckage, rafts and oil slicks.

Last year, the company's parent, DigitalGlobe partnered with Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, and asked the public to help map fires across Indonesia.

Susan Minnemeyer, who manages World Resources Institute's partnership, said almost 20,000 people participated in the 2014 campaign, with 263,668 burn scars tagged between June and November.

"We didn't really know if it would be successful because cloudiness is such a problem but we caught some very powerful images," Ms Minnemeyer said.

"If you had an analyst trying to tag burn scars and fires themselves they could spend months working on it. If you have thousands [of nodders] you can get [the results] in a week or so."

The website uses a CrowdRank algorithm to determine the reliability of the contributions based on the number of people who tag the same site. The crowdsourced data is then made publicly available on the Global Forest Watch Fires map.

On September 17 this year, as choking haze closed schools, delayed flights and caused thousands of people to report to hospitals with respiratory illnesses across the region, a crowdsourcing campaign started once again.

As of Tuesday, 6468 nodders had participated and 5518 fires and 29,493 burn scars had been tagged. The campaign will remain active for the duration of the fire season, expected to last through November.

Ms Minnemeyer says the data collected from Tomnod will provide valuable evidence to document the location and extent of illegal fires, which are often lit to clear the land for palm oil or acacia plantations. "The campaign to identify land fires in Indonesia will share the word that illegal activity will no longer be tolerated," she said. "Our vision is that in future years, smoke and haze and the ill health that they bring will no longer be an annual occurrence."

Eka Sugiri, a spokesman for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry in Indonesia, confirmed satellite imagery as well as on-the-ground teams were used to identify hotspots and assist with police investigations.

Asked if this included crowdsourced data from Tomnod, Mr Sugiri said: "I don't want to mention any companies. But we use satellite imagery from various agencies for several purposes."

Tomnod campaigns in Australia have included mapping rooftop solar panels to gauge the use of residential solar energy, identifying swimming pools to gain insight into the wealth of a community, and pinpointing buildings destroyed by the Sampson Flat bushfires in Adelaide early this year.

"Within 12 hours the Department for Communities and Social Inclusion received information that these were the buildings the crowd has identified as being destroyed," manager Gary Maguire told the ABC. Data was then matched with reports from ground crews to see if any areas had been missed or were inaccessible. "When you add it all up, you can't really employ people for those hours to do the same work," Mr Maguire said.

Mr Liew said the technology made it easy for anyone to "just click and tag".

"It does consume time and the way sometimes you don't get anything out of it can be frustrating. But the key thing is the ease in which people can get involved and seem to do some good, knowing that somehow, it might make a change."