Digital Earth: A Resilient World Requires Resilient Data
February 21st, 2016
Via Ensia, some commentary on the need – given the speed at which humans are altering the biosphere – for a digital resilience so as not to miss the opportunities for forecasting detrimental outcomes in time to avoid them. As the article and the underlying research paper note, global data needs will continue to grow, and will be met as the “digital Earth” expands, especially by way of real-time sensors:
If the bad news is that we’re living in a world in which resilience is more critical to survival than ever, the good news is that technology is more than ever providing the tools we need to cultivate resilience. Exciting innovations in digital data collection, analysis and visualization now allow us to track and understand human impacts at global to local scales and identify big-picture patterns and processes in ways never before possible, from the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative, which measures physical, chemical, biological and geological variables throughout the depths of the ocean to theGlobal Earth Observation System of Systems, which provides petabytes of environmental data from space-borne, airborne andin situ sensors.
Indeed, we now find ourselves inhabiting a “Digital Earth” composed of technologies from satellites to wristwatches that monitor, map, model and manage virtually everything around us.
And it’s not just data for data’s sake. The same digital technologies we use to understand how the Earth works are also helping communities in very practical ways. These range from monitoring fire, drought or flooding to mapping the relevant insurance zones for such. They include tracking economic collapse or health epidemics, finding available drinking water, alerting us to temperature and precipitation changes, determining landscape vulnerability for land managers, monitoring air quality, even identifying the suitability of a position on one’s roof for installing solar panels.
The information such programs produce is precisely what we need to be able to cope with global change. But in order to use it to that end, we need to ensure it’s available to those who need it. In other words, we need to make sure the tools that allow us to gather and use this information are resilient, too. To that end, I propose a set of three principles that data generators should subscribe to and governments should adopt.
1. Share more than just data
To be of societal value, digital data must be tagged and analyzed, a practice commonly known as generating “metadata.” It also must be made available in a format that matches the user’s needs. We should not only share data openly, but also facilitate the use of data in a variety of ways. For example, temperature and precipitation data can be used not only to track or predict the effects of climate change but also to calculate how much energy is needed to cool a home or business in a specific region.
In making our data open to application by others, we need to be open about what we are doing with the data — the actual steps taken in an analysis or map preparation (aka “workflows”) — so others can replicate and validate (or improve upon) our work.
We also need to provide use cases — scenarios showing how and why data were used for a particular analysis or map, with an emphasis on a practical, real-world outcome. For example, a use case might tell the story of the correct or most effective way of using a particular workflow (i.e., the actual steps taken in an analysis or preparation of a map from initiation to completion), including how the data may be used in a range of formats, devices and platforms. If the reader of the use case is able to understand what is going on behind the scenes that produced a certain map or output, this will engender trust in the workflow and hence the results
2. Tell stories
Decades of studies in psychology have repeatedly shown how story affects the human mind and influences attitudes, fears, hopes and values. Storytelling is a valuable tool for taking the knowledge developed within academia and transmitting it into mainstream society in ways that resonate and empower action.
Scientists tend to want to explain how the world works by way of copious background information, overview of prior studies, detailed methods, results and discussion before getting to the take-home message. But policy-makers, journalists and the general public want the take-home message first. Telling stories is one way scientists could meet this need.
In the realm of digital data and information, a relatively new medium called the “story map” offers valuable assistance in telling a specific and compelling story. A story map allows scientists to share not only data, but also photos, videos and even sounds, all within the framework of a digital map. Story maps are created with Web map applications that provide the user with sophisticated cartographic functionality that does not require advanced training in cartography or geographic information systems, usually coupled with data needed to tell the story. Users can also leverage their own data (including workflows and use cases) in new ways to inform, educate and inspire decision-makers on a wide variety of issues.
The illustration below shows the opening page of a Smithsonian Institution story map depicting human influence on our planet and innovations that are helping to promote sustainability.
3. Be open to partnerships
Climate science, resilience studies and ecology are squarely in the realm of academia and government agencies, but it’s critical to partner with industry as well. The private sector is often looking to create and share knowledge toward solving environmental challenges in partnership with academia or government. Many companies are entering into a culture of resilience not only as part of their values or worldview, but also because it is good business.
Public–private partnerships are most successful when based on a holistic strategy that addresses specific community needs. For example, in June 2013, President Obama announced the Climate Data Initiative, which encourages innovators from the private sector and the general public to share data on climate change risks and impacts in compelling and useful ways that help citizens, businesses and communities make smart choices in the face of climate change. Similarly, NOAA has created cooperative research and development agreements with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and the Open Commons Consortium. These industry partners in turn share data with smaller companies such as AccuWeather, Esri (where I work) and PlanetOS to extend the public–private partnership even further. On a smaller scale, the new Research Data Alliance is fostering public-private partnerships to enhance data use, data quality and the adoption of data-sharing approaches and tools.
Communities around the world face increasing challenges from natural and manmade disasters. Whether they face drought or flooding, economic collapse or epidemic, communities need digital information technologies to prepare ahead of time, to operate effectively during events and to recover quickly. For digital technologies to meet this need, they too must be resilient. By sharing workflows and use cases, telling compelling stories, and building private-sector partnerships, we can help ensure that digital resources are able to provide the information we need to effectively respond to challenges wherever and whenever they arise.
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Read More »How Mobile Telephony Can Help Lead To Climate Resistance
February 18th, 2016
Via GSMA, an interesting look at how mobile telephony can help smallholder farmers become more climate resilient:
What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? For most of us, this is a simple question for which the answer can be found at the tip of our fingertips. For the vast rural population in the developing world, the answer isn’t as straightforward. In fact, for the majority of the 2 billion people depending on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihood, access to accurate, localised weather forecasts is a challenge.
We’ve just released a new report that shows how mobile can contribute to improving weather forecasting and monitoring in developing countries. The paper also shows how weather information can help mobile operators and VAS providers evolve the value proposition for agricultural value added services (Agri VAS), increasing the opportunity for scalability and impact of their services.
In the developing world, weather forecasts are predominantly disseminated via traditional media outlets such as TVs and radios. These channels are not easily accessible by all, especially for farmers out in the field who need to time their activities to catch weather updates. Receiving information on weather forecasts is critical for agricultural workers to organise their farming practices, especially in tropical areas where weather patterns can vary largely within short distances. Additionally, the need for weather information is exacerbated by the unpredictable changes of weather patterns in the last decades and its impact on global food supply [1].
Alongside market price information and agronomic advice, weather forecasts are a typical component of mAgri services. However, through our research we’ve identified two main challenges hindering the full value potential weather service information can deliver. These are:
- The source of weather information is often limited to national government agencies with low capacity and obsolete technologies for provision of localised weather data (at best available at a regional and district level);
- Weather content remains generic and static providing little value to the users who look for frequent meteorological updates.
As the most ubiquitous ICT tool in developing countries, we argue that mobile is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. In fact, MNOs and VAS providers can and should invest in providing highly localised, possibly farm-level forecasts with actionable content to improve their overall Agri VAS offering. For farmers, the added value of accessing weather forecasts on their mobile and having information customised and localised to their needs could be very high.
The increasing adoption rate of smartphones with GPS capabilities is offering a technology-based solution to the challenge of localisation, but not for everyone. For the vast majority of the rural population who don’t have access to data services, Agri VAS that include weather forecasts delivered via voice and text channels and over 2G networks are still a need. In this respect, the mobile industry is able to leverage the following capacities:
- In the absence of GPS, low cost location based services (LBS) that leverage existing network intelligence (Cell ID and triangulation techniques) can provide location information needed for relevant weather forecasts (see sub chapter: ‘Creating value of geo location’ page. 12).
- To improve the quality of weather content information, MNOs can form new partnerships with alternative data providers, other than national meteorological agencies. Ignitia, aWhereand Foreca are a few examples of weather data service provider with modelling techniques offering high resolution and localised weather forecasts. In recent years, free and open data initiatives for weather and agriculture have also emerged as another source of weather forecasts (see sub chapter: ‘Improving weather forecasts in Agri VAS’ page. 10)
Exploiting the full value potential of weather information would mean placing weather forecasts at the core of the Agri VAS value proposition rather than an additional component of the service. There is an emerging opportunity for mobile to improve the weather information by linking forecasts to agronomic advice on how to react to these weather conditions.
Paired with its localisation ability, mobile’s unique capability to customise services to the individual user presents an opportunity to evolve the value proposition to weather adaptive models. In fact, as weather patterns threaten to worsen and affect global food supply, mobile can become the ICT tool helping smallholder farmers in developing countries become more resilient to these climate changes. (see chapter: ‘Evolution to weather adaptive and climate smart services’ page. 16)
Figure 1 – Evolution to mAgri holistic bundles
In sum, the report shows that the mobile industry can play a key role not only in disseminating weather forecasts but also in improving weather services by catalysing new content and technology providers. By increasing their focus on weather services, MNOs can evolve the value proposition of their rural services towards more holistic bundles including agronomic advice linked to localised weather forecasts and climate smart agronomic advice. In the next entry we will outline how these bundles can also provide a gateway to mobile money enabled agricultural financial services promoting rural financial inclusion.
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Read More »The Surprising Link Between Mountain Gorillas And iPhones
February 18th, 2016
Via Ozy, an interesting look at the surprising link between mountain gorillas and iPhones:
Deep inside the misty, muddy jungle of Volcanoes National Park, elusive forest elephants, buffalo and hyenas roam around, foraging for food in the cool mountain air. A group of Rwandans in army-green fatigues crouch down, too, nestled among the bushes, observing a troop of mountain gorillas. They’re not guarding the animals, or chasing poachers. Nor are they taking a work break to revel in the natural glory all around them.
No, they’re counting.
It’s part of a massive undertaking: Seventy rangers, zoologists and local guides are trying to count every living mountain gorilla. You’d think it would have been done by now — aren’t we always hearing alarmingly low figures on various threatened animal populations? But in the past, determining hard-and-fast numbers on the mountain-gorilla population was nearly impossible.
The rangers invited him along to the scene of the crime deep in the bush, where they found a rhino with her “face chopped out” and a baby rhino, terrified, protecting her mother.
Welcome to a new, futuristic era of animal conservation, where wildlife tech — in this case, high-end iPhone-style trackers — is being used to track and help save our favorite creatures, whether on land, in the air or in the sea. Technological innovation is replacing the old image of a lone field biologist carrying binoculars and a notebook with things like rangers in Kenya using drones to fight poaching in 52 game parks. You can thank the little computers in every scientist’s pocket, which make it easier to do things like send text messages from the collars of Kenyan elephants to rangers when problem pachyderms come near fields, so the animals won’t get shot and the villagers can still eat. It’s making crime-fighting citizen science a reality, with apps like WildScan in Thailand and Vietnam that let people identify and report the sale of more than 300 illegal pets, from a Southeast Asian box turtle to a pygmy slow loris (we’re looking at you, Rihanna).
Sophisticated criminal networks make big bucks from wildlife trafficking and killing animals like elephants, rhinos and tigers — an industry worth up to $10 billion a year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. That ranks it as the fourth-biggest illicit industry behind drug, human and fake goods trafficking. But wildlife tech is fighting back. Ralph Clark, CEO of ShotSpotter, was in South Africa’s Kruger National Park when the system, which pinpoints gunfire coordinates and alerts rangers within 30 seconds, detected gunshots. Poachers were on the hunt. The rangers invited him along to the scene of the crime deep in the bush, where they found a rhino with her “face chopped out” and a baby rhino, terrified, protecting her mother. Though the poachers got to the mom, the park rangers were able to save the baby, which would have otherwise died without her mother. Sadly, this rhino was one of 1,215 killed in South Africa in 2014.
Conservationist and founder of Mongabay Rhett Butler says it’s remarkable how reluctant most wildlife biologists were to veer from more traditional uses of tech in the field, like camera traps or tagging. There’s been a disconnect between tech engineers and the jungles of Southeast Asia, or the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, but now cheaper and more prevalent gadgets — not to mention easier-to-grab data from satellites and the cloud — make it more accessible and compelling. This trend is linking together biologists, NGOs, government agencies and techies who want to stop crime, for the sake of the animals and because it’s been said to finance things like terrorism and sex trafficking. ShotSpotter’s original purpose, for example, was to detect and alert police of gunfire in 90 cities across the U.S. Even the U.S. government is trying to translate tech to the conservation context, with a $500,000 contest for innovative ideas to bust the bad guys.
Part of fighting poaching means tracking populations. When rangers know precisely how many gorillas or rhinos live in an area, they are aware when one goes missing. And with polished figures comes better data for scientists and more accurate conservation policies, which can mean bigger animal populations and more tourism, which can equal more money. It’s like an exponentially positive chain reaction. In places like Rwanda, more gorillas has meant far more money. The gorillas had more than 20,000 visitors in 2014, a threefold increase in 11 years, according to government figures.
It’s a fascinating story, not just about tech, or nature, or the economy, but also about the interconnectedness of it all. Most governments, particularly cash-strapped ones, are not going to conserve wildlife for ethical reasons. But if they see a way for the wildlife to bring in revenue — more gorillas, more money — it’s a different ball game. And every week it seems that iPhone-size technology has new applications.
But some tech toys can do more harm than good in the wrong hands. South African rangers are reluctant to reveal how or where they arrest would-be poachers when the ShotSpotter system is in play because it might reveal the location of the system, which would defeat the whole purpose. The ShotSpotter system underwent a camouflage makeover so poachers can’t find and disassemble it. There’s also the very real issue of corruption — its second shot ever captured, for example, uncovered an inside poaching job. There’s no point in having a detection system if park employees are passing along information. The fear of this has bigger consequences, too. Big-budget buyers like the U.S. Department of Defense are happy to keep tech prices artificially high to keep the gadgets in the “right” hands.
Then there’s the unsexy side of tech in the field. A lot of what’s useful inSilicon Valley simply doesn’t translate to rural areas or match on-the-ground realities — like harsh environments or local perceptions. There are “concerns about rich Westerners using drones to essentially spy on poor communities who may be poaching,” says Butler. Or using technology that doesn’t seek biologist input first. White rhinos, for one, can wear certain collars just fine, but put the same thing on a black rhino and it will rub its ears off. “The reality is … a lot of money can be wasted,” says Eric Dinerstein, director of WildTech at Resolve.
The last big hurdle is something we take for granted: cell connectivity. Conservationists hope the Facebooks and Googles of the world will have success with their Internet airplanes and other futuristic projects aimed at connecting the developing world (where most threatened species live). Because all the tech on the planet won’t make a difference if you can’t actually call for backup when you know where a poacher is.
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