Track forest fires in your lunch break

Crowdsourcing tool lets amateurs comb through satellite imagery.

A website used to search for the missing MH370 aeroplane is now helping track forest fires that are sending toxic fumes across South East Asia. The website, Tomnod, has 1,903 people scanning through thousands of satellite images to find signs of fires in Indonesian forests. The search began 18 days ago and covers 557,024 square kilometres. Anyone can log onto the website, navigate through the satellite images, and place tags on every fire, smoke plume and burn mark they find. This is the second time that this crowdsourcing tool is being used to monitor forest fires in Indonesia since 2014. The website has a “10x Coverage” rule to ensure that every object tagged is verified by multiple people. “Every image tile must be searched by 10 unique taggers for the campaign to be 100% complete,” Tomnod’s website says. It uses a computer algorithm to analyse the crowdsourced data. “We use CrowdRank, our statistical algorithm, to examine every mark from the every person, identify the locations of maximum agreement and figure out what is going on,” the website says. Tomnod has partnered with Global Forest Watch, a project to track forest fires in real-time, to better understand the number and location of fires in Indonesia. Visit the site to help track Indonesian forest fires.