Digitizing Landscapes: Sensors, Satellites, & You!

iSeeChange is a crowd-sourced climate change documentation effort that seeks to bring ground truth and human perspective to the daily reality of the shifting climate. First developed in Western Colorado with KVNF Mountain... [ view full abstract ]

iSeeChange is a crowd-sourced climate change documentation effort that seeks to bring ground truth and human perspective to the daily reality of the shifting climate. First developed in Western Colorado with KVNF Mountain Public Radio and the Association for Independents in Radio, the project is creating an engaging community almanac of the new climate era, from written posts of heat waves, to audio recordings of the water shortages to photography of the first frost.

This year, iSeeChange is partnering with NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to develop a pilot project tentatively called "NASA Citizen Science Corps" that will help monitor the Earth's vital statistics, both on the ground and from space. The goal of this Citizen Science Corps is to engage science-interested citizens by inviting them to participate in NASA’s OCO-2 mission and expand the pool of both iSeeChange participants and earth observation data users. Additionally, iSeeChange will also partner with the BEACON project, a system of approximately two dozen air quality monitoring “nodes” spaced on a 2-km grid around the city of Oakland, CA. This spatially dense network rapidly samples CO2 concentrations and uploads them to a website in near real time, giving collaborating researchers and members of the Oakland community unique access to high-resolution pictures of how the urban landscape and lifestyle affects CO2 levels in the area.

Using iSeeChange’s digital platform, its network of contributors, and public media partners, local communities will be called to action on a regular basis to collect measurements, take photographs, post observations and ask questions online. By combining local community stories, data, and satellite data, iSeeChange aims to connect the dots between where we live, how we live, and the impacts that climate change has on the world around us.