I was interviewed by B. David Zarley for Freethink as part of an article about the NASA landslides team's efforts with citizen science and landslide modeling. A snippet of the article is below.
But how to gather enough information to verify and update the model, with such small and localized events, limited satellites, and a world to search?
NASA's answer is... you. Finding out when and where landslides occur is a huge challenge, one that NASA is hoping to offset with many eyes. While the satellites are useful, as far as they go, they must also be joined with reports from media and witnesses on the ground.
Citizen scientists can add information about recent landslides to NASA's "COOLR" database (that's "Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository," in case you were wondering). NASA uses this crowdsourced data to beef up its Global Landslide Catalog.Â
With limited satellites and a world to search, how can we gather enough information to verify and update the landslide models? NASA's answer is... you.
Using the Landslide Reporter tool, you can add data like time, location, cause, size — on a scale from "small to "catastrophic" — and the types of landslides observed. (You can even name it!) All the fields are explained in how-to guides, so you know what info goes where, says COOLR's architect, Caroline Juang.
"The variables themselves are not at a level where they are so highly scientific that nobody can learn it," Juang says.Â
Since its launch in spring 2018, roughly 200 landslide reports have been filed to COOLR.
"We're already starting to see, with that small data set, that there are gaps that are starting to be filled in," Kirschbaum says. COOLR's "super-users" are instrumental in filling these gaps, especially in places where language barriers make scanning media reports for landslides more difficult.
Read the full article at Freethink.