Beating the heat with more data on urban form and function

By Linda See, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program

We had another very hot summer this year in Europe and many other parts of the world. Many European cities, including London, Madrid, Frankfurt, Paris and Geneva, broke new temperature records.

Cities are particularly vulnerable to increasing temperatures because of a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. First measured more than a half a century ago by Tim Oke, the increased temperatures measured in urban areas are a result of urban land use, or higher amounts of impervious surfaces such as concrete and concentrated urban structures. The urban heat island effect impacts human health and well-being. It’s not just a matter of comfort: during the heat wave in 2003, more than 70,000 people in Europe are estimated to have perished, mostly urban dwellers.

IMG_7148

Summer 2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. ©K. Leitzell | IIASA

While climate models have many uncertainties, they do all agree that the urban heat island effect will increase in frequency and duration in the future. A recent article by Hannah Hoag in Nature paints a bleak picture of just how unprepared cities are for dealing with increasing temperatures. The paper cites positive and negative examples of mitigation from various cities but it falls short of suggesting a more widely applicable solution.

What we need is a standardized way of approaching the problem. Underlying this lack of standards is the paucity of data on the form and function of cities. By form I mean the geometry of the city–a 3D model of the buildings and road network, and information on the building materials—as well as a map of the basic land cover including impervious surfaces like roads and sidewalks, and areas of vegetation such as gardens, parks, and fields. Function refers to the building use, road types, use of irrigation and air conditioning and other factors that affect local atmospheric conditions. As climate models become more highly resolved, they will need vast amounts of such information to feed into them.

These issues are what led me and my colleagues (Prof Gerald Mills of UCD, Dr Jason Ching of UNC and many others) to conceive the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) initiative (www.wudapt.org). WUDAPT is a community-driven data collection effort that draws upon the considerable network of urban climate modelers around the world. We start by dividing a city into atmospherically distinct areas, or Local Climate Zones (LCZs) developed by Stewart and Oke, which provides a standard methodology for characterizing cities that can improve the parameters needed for data-hungry urban climate models.

Using freely available satellite imagery of the Earth’s surface, the success of the approach relies on local urban experts to provide representative examples of different LCZs across their city. We are currently working towards creating an LCZ classification for all C40 cities (a network of cities committed to addressing climate change) but are encouraging volunteers to work on any cities that are of interest to them. We refer to this as Level 0 data collection because it provides a basic classification for each city. Further detailed data collection efforts (referred to as Levels 1 and 2) will use a citizen science approach to gather information on building materials and function, landscape morphology and vegetation types.

The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) map for Kiev.

The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) map for Kiev.

WUDAPT will equip climate modelers and urban planners with the data needed to examine a range of mitigation and adaptation scenarios: For example what effect will green roofs, changes in land use or changes in the urban energy infrastructure have on the urban heat island and future climate?

The ultimate goal of WUDAPT is to develop a very detailed open access urban database for all major cities in the world, which will be valuable for many other applications from energy modelling to greenhouse gas assessment. If we want to improve the science of urban climatology and help cities develop their own urban heat adaptation plans, then WUDAPT represents one concrete step towards reaching this goal. Contact us if you want to get involved.

About the WUDAPT Project
The WUDAPT concept has been developed during two workshops, one held in Dublin Ireland in July 2014 and the second in conjunction with the International Conference on Urban Climate in Toulouse; a third workshop is set to take place in Hong Kong in December 2015. More information can be found on the WUDAPT website at: http://www.wudapt.org.

References
Bechtel, B., Alexander, P., Böhner, J., Ching, J., Conrad, O., Feddema, J., Mills, G., See, L. and Stewart, I. 2015. Mapping local climate zones for a worldwide database of form and function of cities.  International Journal of Geographic Information, 4(1), 199-219.

Hoag, H. 2015. How cities can beat the heat. Nature, 524, 402-404.

See, L., Mills, G. and Ching. J. 2015. Community initiative counters urban heat. Nature, 526,43 (01 October 2015) doi:10.1038/526043b

Stewart, I.D. and Oke, T.R. 2012. Local Climate Zones for urban temperature studies. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 93(12), 1879-1900.

Wake, B. 2012. Defining local zones. Nature Climate Change, 2, 487.

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.

Network science and marketing: A virus’ tale

By Matthias Wildemeersch,  IIASA Advanced Systems Analysis and Ecosystems Services and Management Programs

FotoQuest Austria is a citizen science campaign initiated by the IIASA Ecosystems Services & Management Program that aims to involve the general public in mapping land use in Austria. Understanding the evolution of urban sprawl is important to estimate the risk of flooding, while the preservation of wetlands has important implications for climate change.

But how can we engage people in environmental monitoring, in particular when they are growing increasingly resistant to traditional forms of advertising? Viral marketing makes use of social networks to spread messages, and takes advantage of the trust that we have in the recommendation coming from a friend rather than from a stranger or a company.

Network science and the formal description of spreading phenomena can shed light on the propagation of messages through communities and can be applied to inform and design viral marketing campaigns.

Viral spreading © kittitee550 | Dollar Photo Club

Viral spreading © kittitee550 | Dollar Photo Club

Network science is a multi-disciplinary field of research that draws on graph theory, statistical mechanics, inference, and other theories to study the behavior of agents in various networks. The spreading phenomena in viral marketing show similarities with well-studied spreading processes over biological, social, physical, and financial networks. For instance, we can think about epidemics,which are well understood and allow for the design of optimal strategies to contain viruses. Another example is opinion dynamics, which received renewed research attention over the last years in the context of social media.  In contrast to diseases or computer viruses, which we aim to contain and stop, the goal of viral marketing is to spread widely, reaching the largest possible fraction of a community.

What makes viral marketing unique?
But some aspects of viral marketing are very different from what we see in other spreading phenomena. First of all, there are many platforms that can be used to spread information at the same time, and the interaction between these platforms is not always transparent. Human psychology is a crucial factor in social networks, as repeated interaction and saturation can decrease the willingness to further spread viral content. Marketing campaigns have a limited budget, and therefore it is meaningful to understand how we can use incentives and how efficient they are. This also means that it is essential to find the group of most influential people that can be used as seeds for the viral campaign.

Network science has addressed to a great extent all these individual questions, mostly under the assumption of full knowledge of the connections between the agents and their influence. Currently, so-called multiplexes are an active research field that studies the behavior of multi-layer networks. This research unveils the relationships between the dynamics of viral marketing, the connection pattern, and strength between the network layers. Although viral spreading may be unachievable in a single layer, for example a social network like Facebook, the critical threshold may be exceeded by joining different platforms. Within a given platform, people alike can be clustered using community detection algorithms. Once the communities are identified, influence maximization algorithms have been established to select these persons that maximize the spread of viral content. Although this discrete optimization problem is computationally difficult—or NP-hard—mathematicians have proposed algorithms that can efficiently predict who to target to give a campaign the best chance of going viral. On top of that, optimal pricing strategies have been developed to reward recommenders.

The FotoQuest Austria app aims to engage citizen scientists in their campaign - network theory may help them go "viral." © IIASA

The FotoQuest Austria app aims to engage citizen scientists in their campaign – network theory may help them go “viral.” © IIASA

Although the literature is extensive, the nature of the results is often theoretical and involves mathematically complex models and algorithms. Considering that only partial information on the network is usually available, it is not straightforward to bring this knowledge back to a practical marketing campaign. So researchers in this field are trying to bridge the gap between theoretical results and practical problems. The generic, powerful methods of network science are sufficiently versatile to capture the specifics of real-world applications. As such, network science can provide guidelines that can bring great value for the design of heuristic methods in marketing strategies.

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.

Interview: Taking Geo-Wiki to the ground

Steffen Fritz has just been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to fund a research project on crowdsourcing and ground data collection on land-use and land cover. In this interview he talks about his plans for the new project, CrowdLand. 

Pic by Neil Palmer (CIAT).

Farmers in Kenya are one group which the Crowdland Project aims to involve in their data gathering. Photo credit: Neil Palmer, CIAT

What’s the problem with current land cover data?
There are discrepancies between current land cover products, especially in cropland data. It’s all based on satellite data, and in these data, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between cropland and natural vegetation in certain parts of the world if you do not use so-called very high resolution imagery, similar to a picture you take from space. With this high-resolution data you can see structures like fields and so on, which you can then use to distinguish between natural vegetation and cropland. But this is a task where currently people are still better at than computers–and there is a huge amount of data to look at.

In our Geo-Wiki project and related efforts such as the Cropland Capture game, we have asked volunteers to look at these high-resolution images and classify the ground cover as cropland or not cropland. The efforts have been quite successful, but our new project will take this even further.

How will the new project expand on what you’ve already done in Geo-Wiki?
The big addition is to go on the ground. Most of the exercises we currently do are based on the desktop or the phones, or tablets, asking volunteers to classify imagery that they see on a screen.

What this project aims to do is to improve data you collect on the ground, known as in-situ data.  You can use photography, GPS sensors, but also your knowledge you have about what you see. We will use volunteers to collect basic land cover data such as tree cover, cropland, and wetlands, but also much more detailed land-use information. With this type of data we can document what crops are grown where, whether they are irrigated, if the fields are fertilized, what exact type of crops are growing, and other crop management information which you cannot see in satellite imagery. And there are some things you can’t even see when you’re on the ground, thus you need to ask the farmer or recruit the farmer as a data provider. That’s an additional element this project will bring, that we will work closely with farmers and people on the ground.

For the study, you have chosen Austria and Kenya. Why these two countries?
In Austria we have much better in situ data. For example, the Land Use Change Analysis System (LUCAS) in Europe collects in situ data according to a consistent protocol. But this program is very expensive, and the agency that runs it, Eurostat, is discussing how to reduce costs. Additionally the survey is only repeated every three years so fast changes are not immediately recorded. Some countries are not in favor of LUCAS and they prefer to undertake their own surveys. Then however you lose the overall consistency and there is no Europe-wide harmonized database which allows for comparison between countries.   Our plan is to use gaming, social incentives, and also small financial incentives to conduct a crowdsourced LUCAS survey. Then we will examine what results you get when you pay volunteers or trained volunteers compared to the data collected by experts.

In Kenya, the idea is similar, but in general in the developing world we have very limited information, and the resources are not there for major surveys like in Europe. In order to remedy that the idea is again to use crowdsourcing and use a “bounded crowd” which means people who have a certain level of expertise, and know about land cover and land use, for example people with a surveyor background, university students, or interested citizens who can be trained. But in developing countries in particular it’s important to use financial incentives. Financial incentives, even small ones, could probably help to collect much larger amounts of data. Kenya is a good choice also because it has quite a good internet connection, a 3G network, and a lot of new technologies evolving around mobile phones and smartphone technology.

What will happen with the data you collect during this project?
First, we will analyze the data in terms of quality.  One of our research questions is how good are the data collected by volunteers compared to data collected by experts. Another research question is how can imperfect but large data collected by volunteers be filtered and combined so that it becomes useful and fulfills the scientific accuracy requirements.

Then we will use these data and integrate them into currently existing land use and land cover data, and find ways to make better use of it. For example, in order to make projections about future land-use and to better quantify current yield gaps it is crucial to get accurate current information on land-use, including spatially explicit information on crop types, crop management information and other data.

Once we have done some quality checks we will also make these data available for other researchers or interested groups of people.

Crowdsourcing for land cover is in its infancy. There have been lots of crowdsourcing projects in astronomy, archaeology, and biology, for example, but there hasn’t been much on land use, and there is huge potential there. ”We need to not only better understand the quality of the data we collect, but also expand the network of institutions who are working on this topic.”

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

How games can help science: Introducing Cropland Capture

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

Researchers estimate we spend 3 billion hours a week on game playing. CC Image courtesy TheErin on Flickr

Researchers estimate we spend 3 billion hours a week on game playing. CC Image courtesy TheErin on Flickr

On a recent rush hour train ride in London I looked around to see just about everybody absorbed in their mobile phone or tablet. This in itself is not that unusual. But when I snooped over a few shoulders, what really surprised me was that most of those people were playing games. I hope this bodes well for our new game, Cropland Capture, introduced last week.

Cropland Capture is a game version of our citizen science project Geo-Wiki, which has a growing network of interested experts and volunteers who regularly help us in validating land cover through our competitions. By turning the idea into a game, we hope to reach a much wider audience.

Playing Cropland Capture is simple: look at a satellite image and tell us if you see any evidence of cropland. This will help us build a better map of where cropland is globally, something that is surprisingly uncertain at the moment. This sort of data is crucial for global food security, identifying where the big gaps in crop yields are, and monitoring crops affected by droughts, amongst many other applications.

Gamification and citizen science
The idea of Cropland Capture is not entirely unique. There are an astonishingly large number of games available for high tech gaming consoles, PCs and increasingly, mobile devices. While the majority of these games are pure entertainment, some are part of an emerging genre known as ”serious games” or ”games with a purpose.” These are games that either have an educational element or through the process of playing them, you can help scientists in doing their research. One of the most successful examples is the game FoldIt, where teams of players work together to decode protein structures. This is not an easy task for a computer to do, but some people are exceptionally talented at seeing these patterns. The result has even led to new scientific discoveries that have been published in high level journals such as Nature.

Jane McGonigal, in her book Reality is Broken (Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World), estimates that we spend 3 billion hours a week alone on game playing, and that the average young person spends more time gaming by the end of their school career than they have actually spent in school. Although these figures may seem alarming, McGonigal argues that there are many positive benefits associated with gaming, including the development of problem-solving skills, the ability to cope better with problems such as depression or chronic pain, and even the possibility that we might live ten years longer if we played games. If people spent just a fraction of this time on “serious games” like FoldIt and Cropland Capture, imagine how much could be achieved.

Since the game started last Friday, 185 players have validated 119,777 square kilometers of land (more than twice the land area of Denmark).

photo

Cropland Capture is easy to play – simply swipe the picture left or right to say whether there is cropland or not.

Get in the game
You can play Cropland Capture on a tablet (iPad or Android) or mobile phone (iPhone or Android). Download the game from the Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. For those who prefer an online version, you can also play the game at: http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/croplandcapture/. For more information about the game, check out our videos at:  http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/instructions-videos/. During the next six months, we will be providing regular updates on Twitter (@CropCapture) and Facebook.

The game is being played for  six months, where the top scorer each week will be crowned the weekly winner. The 25 weekly winners will then be entered into a draw at the end of the competition to win three big prizes: an Amazon Kindle, a smartphone, and a tablet. The game was launched only last week so there is plenty of time to get involved and help scientific research.

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.