The Southern African YSSP: My experience

By Valentina Prado, PhD student at Arizona State University, SA-YSSP participant 2012-2013 @ValentinaASU

Valentina Prado

Enjoying the landscape around Bloemfontein.

I am a PhD student in Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). I was born in Cali, Colombia, and when I was in high school, my family immigrated to Canada seeking educational opportunities for me and my sister.  I did my last two years of high school in British Columbia, Canada and my undergraduate degree at Jackson State University (JSU) in Mississippi, USA (where I earned a tennis athletic scholarship).

After a degree in Civil Engineering at JSU, I decided to pursue a graduate engineering degree with an environmental sustainability focus. So, in the fall of 2010, I joined Dr. Thomas P. Seager’s research group to study decision analysis methods for environmental management problems.

The SA-YSSP program

When I found out about the Southern African Young Scientists Summer Program (SA-YSSP), it seemed too good to be true. I was immediately drawn by the project involving Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tools because I apply these tools in my PhD thesis and I was familiar with the work from the SA-YSSP supervisors: Prof. Theodor Stewart from the University of Cape Town, Prof. Detlof von Winterfeldt from University of Southern California and Dr. Marek Makowski from IIASA. I even had one of their books on my desk when reading the call for applicants. The timing of the program was tough because of the academic schedule, but my graduate committee at ASU encouraged me to apply and worry about the logistics later. In fact, when it was time for the logistics, there was no time to worry- everything had to be quick! All of a sudden I was on my way from Phoenix to Bloemfontein, South Africa.

valentina prado and sa-yssp participants

Here’s a group picture from the SA-YSSP. I’m in yellow.

My project in the SA-YSSP evaluates environmental, social, and economic aspects of possible energy pathways in South Africa using MCDA tools—which allow us look for solutions to complex problems with many trade-offs. For this project, we focused on a period of energy transition in South Africa where natural gas is a key player. We used these tools to examine how thermo-electric power is produced in South Africa, and how different generation technologies perform economically, environmentally, and socially. For each energy pathway, we take into account environmental impacts concerning water and air quality, social impacts such as job creation and cost of production. We have already submitted our findings for publication.

In all, participating in SA YSSP was outside of anything I could have ever imagined – it was one of the most amazing and productive experiences of my life! I got to travel to a place that otherwise I would have not gone, I got to work on a really cool project with renowned people in the field, and I got to meet wonderful young scientists from all over the world.   I also learned more about the IIASA community and discovered that it is something that I will consider taking part during my doctorate or after. In addition, the people at University of the Free State took good care of us. It was 3 unbelievable months where I celebrated my birthday with friends from over 10 different countries and felt at home, learned about South Africa’s history, saw a penguin, ran a 5km race, ate bobotie, and got to pet 2-week old baby lions. All in three months. Amazing.  I feel incredibly fortunate to have participated in the SA YSSP program.

I never thought I would get to travel and meet so many wonderful people with my research. I also don’t think my parents ever considered the educational opportunities in South Africa when they immigrated to Canada! Coming from Colombia, South Africa is not a place you typically visit, or stay for three months (unless you are Shakira).  In all, I would like to thank all the sponsor organizations and staff for organizing the SA YSSP program, and allowing me the opportunity to participate.

Editor’s Note:

Applications for the 2013-2014 SA-YSSP have been extended to the 16th of September. Please visit the IIASA Web site for more information: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/education/sa-yssp/About-the-Program.en.html

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. 

Mapping the world with crowdsourcing

By Linda See, Research Scholar, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program

Humans have a long history of map-making that can be traced back to cave paintings older than 20,000 years, and detailed maps made by the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Chinese. These maps tell the story of exploration and changing borders of states, countries, and populations.

image of geo-wiki interface

This screenshot shows our Geo-Wiki tool for collecting data from the crowd.

Until recently, military and government mapping agencies have been entirely in control of mapping, but this is changing. The rise of neogeography and user-generated geo-referenced content online has led to a new generation of community-based maps such as OpenStreetMap. Enabled by interactive web technology (Web 2.0) and the GPS in mobile phones, people are now mapping different aspects of the Earth’s surface through crowdsourcing. This new model has proved its worth in cases like the post-disaster recovery, e.g. the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

The trouble with maps
Even in this age of satellites and space technology, it is far from easy to generate good automated representations of the Earth’s surface. While satellite imagery has allowed us to create global maps of land cover—the various materials such as grass, trees, water, and cities that cover the Earth’s surface—at various resolutions from 10 km to 30 m, there are two main problems with all the different products that are now currently available. The first is that these products have accuracies that are only between 65 to 75%. Secondly, when they are compared with one another, there are large spatial disagreements between them. If you are a user of these products, which one should you choose? How can you trust any one of these products when they have uncertainties as large as 25 to 35%? And more importantly, without good baseline information about the Earth’s land cover, such as the amount of forest or cropland, how can we possibly predict what will happen in the future?

The Geo-Wiki Project
Our Geo-Wiki project aims to solve this problem through crowdsourcing. With open access to satellite imagery through Google Earth and Bing Maps, citizens and interested experts can help us better characterize land cover, to correct existing land cover maps or build new ones. Geo-Wiki is a simple set of tools to sample the Earth’s surface, which allows a network of Geo-Wiki volunteers to tell us what type of land cover is visible from Google Earth or Bing Maps.

Map of ethiopia showing cropland

This map of cropland in Ethiopia was created from crowd-sourced data.

One example of our crowd-sourcing campaigns was focused on mapping cropland in Ethiopia. Over a three week period, we collected more than 80,000 samples across the country, roughly 5% of the area of Ethiopia. Using simple interpolation, we have demonstrated that a cropland map of Ethiopia, a key type of land cover, can be created very easily, with just a small crowd of volunteers. We validated the map using an official validation data set from the GOFC/GOLD reference portal as well as other crowdsourced data collected through Geo-Wiki. The results of this study showed that the map is considerably more accurate than global land cover maps for Ethiopia when considering only cropland. You can find more details about this research at:

See, L. McCallum, I., Fritz, S., Perger, C., Kraxner, F., Obersteiner, M., Deka Baruah, U., Mili, N. and Ram Kalita, N. 2013. Mapping Cropland in Ethiopia using Crowdsourcing. International Journal of Geosciences, 4(6A1), 6-13 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijg.2013.46A1002.

Get involved
The Ethiopian example is just the tip of the mapping iceberg. As more citizens get involved in mapping land cover online—for example with our Geo-Wiki Pictures app, we could revolutionize land cover mapping in the future.

If you are interested in helping us improve land cover, register at http://www.geo-wiki.org or find us on Facebook  to join our crowdsourcing network and learn more about upcoming crowdsourcing campaigns.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.