Participating is free and there is no membership for Cartoscope. The Unique Mappers Team of Nigeria has partnered with Cartoscope, Healthy Gulf, and Northeastern University to create the Land Pollution Lookout project. This project is globally launching during Citizen Science Month -- this April -- and the team is inviting you to two webinars to participate in a launch challenge. The Land Pollution Lookout project empowers volunteers from around the world to investigate or identify oil spills in the Niger Delta by classifying images.
The webinars are live, interactive online events produced in partnership with SciStarter.
Watch the recording of the first webinar: https://www.facebook.com/SciStarter/videos/957157265002558
For the second webinar, attend for more information about the project and anticipated results, as well as for an update on how different teams are doing in the challenge! Register on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cR5b3Du7RcCHSz8-71gmNQ
If you'd like to participate in the challenge with a team, form the team with your friends, family, and colleagues offline, and then whenever you get to the point in participation in the project where you're directed to the SciStarter credit form, please enter the team name you all agreed on!
You can find the project here: https://scistarter.org/land-pollution-lookout
Watch a video about the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6xOuWxXBRA
BACKGROUND ON THE PROJECT
The Niger Delta region of Nigeria is the epicenter of oil exploration and oil spills that have impacted the environment. Most of the communities traversed by pipelines and oil facilities are heavily impacted by oil spills.
As such, there is a need to assess environmental indicators of impacted land use on vegetation. Even the creeks and the globally recognized RAMSAR sites are heavily impacted and are rapidly degrading due to environmentally dangerous activities such as sand mining, oil spill pollution, dredging activity and farmlands. Communities residing within these areas are not comfortable with this degrading situation.
The Land Pollution Lookout project will create a crowdsourced assessment of environmental indicators of the impacted areas by oil pollution in the Niger Delta region, using satellite imagery, so as to provide community engagement for citizen science volunteers in Nigeria and around the world in the global citizen science movement.
Participate in the Land Pollution Lookout project: https://scistarter.org/land-pollution-lookout
BACKGROUND ON THIS COLLABORATION
When Caroline Nickerson from SciStarter was Miss Louisiana Earth, her platform was "Citizen Science Empowers Resiliency," and the main project she supported was Land Loss Lookout (run by Healthy Gulf, Cartoscope, and Northeastern University). People from all over the world were able to volunteer with the Land Loss Lookout project to classify land loss photos from the Gulf Coast of the US, to help come to a research result to make it more resilient against hurricanes and other environmental issues.
The main group that volunteered were students and community members from Nigeria -- the Unique Mappers. Caroline had a challenge for the last two weeks of her reign and the Unique Mappers classified almost 1,000 images. In part supported by the Beauty for a Cause scholarship from Miss Earth USA (which Caroline donated to Healthy Gulf), the team was able to use the technical tools created for Land Loss Lookout to help people in Nigeria classify their environmental problems with a new project -- Land Pollution Lookout.
The Land Loss Lookout Project is still ongoing. You can participate here: https://scistarter.org/land-loss-lookout
BACKGROUND ON THE UNIQUE MAPPERS
Unique Mappers Network (UniqueMappersTeam) or UMT Network is a Nigerian registered nonprofit organization with a mandate and mission for Humanitarian Response and Community Development through:
1. Open Mapping using OpenStreetMap project in Nigeria
2. Mobile Data collection & Field Surveys for open data development
3. Open-Source Geospatial Empowerment using GeoForAll Lab
4. Flying Lab/Community Drone Mapping for open data development
5. Participatory Citizen Science Projects for community engagement
6. Gender-Equality and Youth Empowerment using Open Data & Open Geospatial
7. Community Inclusive Empowerment for Sustainable Development Actions
We network to provide map data, that is open and accessible for disaster response, emergency crises, research, and economic development to achieve a measurable target of Sustainable Development Goals.
We drive operational capacity for community engagement across the 36 states of Nigeria, with emerging Unique Mappers state chapters and Unique Mappers response teams in Higher Institutions in Nigeria and Beyond.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/unique-mappers-network-umt-269a6520a/