Global HEARTbeat - Space Apps Challenge

Global HEARTbeat| Planet, With People

Awards & Nominations

Global HEARTbeat has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Planet, With People

Your challenge is to build on the Human Planet Initiative of the Group on Earth Observations to apply new methods for mapping attributes of human populations. How can Human Planet data from NASA and other sources be used to improve or update maps or other information important to a problem that concerns you? Design or create a tool or service to accomplish this.

Global Hazard Exposure and Resiliency Trends by Earth observation and Analysis Tools

Summary

Global HEARTBEAT is an interactive web-portal aimed at providing geo-located information on natural and human hazards surrounding the communities of the Philippines and Canada. Using the tool, users will be able to overlay various satellite layers against socio-economic data gathered by our researchers.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our tool builds on the Human Planet Initiative to provide a simplified interface of the SEDAC map layers for quicker deployment to professionals from a variety of fields. This is done through a curated list of layers juxtaposed over other locally relevant data sets, using a risk framework (hazards and exposure, vulnerabilities, lack of coping ability). Users, managers and planners will be able to personalize their dashboard to allow for desk research or field deployment. This will give them better insight for planning and risk response.

This is from the INFORM Global risk Index (GRI) tool as defined by the EU Joint Research Center (JRC). It is a combination of indicators as characterized by these dimensions of risk. This is a global, open-source framework which aim for improved evidence-based risk analysis.

How We Developed This Project

Thought-process and expectations:

We came together as a team by sharing experiences in social impact. Personal relevance played a big role in choosing our particular action plan. Members of the team have knowledge or previously worked on COVID research, agricultural development, risk assessment and disaster response. With four members from the Philippines working with a colleague from Canada, scheduling and regular updates were crucial in having an optimal workflow.

Choosing the challenge:

Our first impulse was to go for Confront: Better Together, with the specific target of creating a tool. We realized some aspects of inequality were particular to a country, and not present in others. Early on, we had looked at generic (health, agriculture, pollution, poverty) and country-specific (hazards - volcanoes vs. flooding) aspects. We turned to other challenges and came across Sustain: Planet, with People - this got us to think about not creating a new method for analysis but rather a way for making the information more accessible to those who may need it. So we “took apart” most of the resources listed for the challenge.

While we did have previous experience with satellite imagery through mapping and analysis, we often see the complexity of the tool limits the reach of the information. Add to this, the large file sizes often delayed processing the information. Our experience fit the challenge of building on the Human Planet Initiative. Circling around SEDAC, this is where we realized its huge potential but were discouraged by the complexity.

This led us to establish a framework for contextualizing this enormous amount of information. Of course, individual contexts played a role in choosing our frameworks, we always came back to health, resources, and disaster response. On top of that, it had to be in an easy-to-digest format.

Processing the challenge:

Using a pre-determined framework according to EU JRC: INFORM allowed us to define planning and response scenarios to address universal issues. We also shopped around for other similar tools and found them to be either too niche or too resource heavy (slow). Based on this framework, we began to look at who would benefit most from this interface. We see this valuable both in the field as a rapid assessment tool, or in local planning sessions.

Core drive:

We wanted to make technical data more readable/accessible

to look at large areas or zero-in on a region
to use available data into a one-stop shop tool
to use historical data to provide a glimpse into what may happen
to use supplemental data to help real-time decision makers

Mapping risk, hazards and exposure to a region or nation

Allow users to overlay local resource data

Baseline social data as the fundamental reference for allocation of resources

Tools, coding languages, hardware, software:

With the time difference between Canada and the Philippines, it helped to have video conferencing (Zoom, GMeet). All of the team had access to GSuite and were able to edit the documents concurrently. The team built the web app with MapBox API, the SEDAC WMS API, and HTML 5 / CSS / JS/ AWS.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PwhUAtV9is2uSSEQH8L6e9gVEJNKdVxw/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PslDavnqWnioqYSj0KW85lb824u39Cpq/view?usp=sharing

Difficulties and Triumphs:

Finding adequate data sets for our target regions was difficult. Validity was a concern as well as granularity.

The team has experience coding with Mapbox and Anychart. So working with OpenLayers didn't seem too difficult, and it became a lot more amazing when we found the libraries in the SEDAC Services tab. We then had access to a large number of map layers. Next challenge was to pick between regional or smaller areas, and get their boundaries and coordinates.

Of course as everything was flowing smoothly, our Github repository had to crash on the last stretch. This caused a huge delay to an otherwise almost done prototype.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We culled map layers from NASA SEDAC using its web services. It was amazing to see so many characteristics across the globe. We were originally looking at NDVI readings, but found the SEDAC data sets more conducive to analysis. CSA Canada Open Data was also referenced. We also used NASA Worldview as a peg.

https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/maps/services