Hashtags help document the recovery from California forest fires
Crowdsourced science can only help, the logic goes.
Eight years after a hunter in California started one of the worst fires in state history, crowdsourced social media efforts are helping ecologists understand how the environment in Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park is starting to come back.
The project, called Monitor Change - The Rim Fire, is an effort to gather data about reforestation throughout more than 250,000 acres of land. Driven by the U.S. Forest Service and teams of volunteers, the plan was to observe regrowth after 2013’s Rim Fire, which raged for nine weeks and cost $127 million to suppress. The flames threatened California’s power infrastructure, a reservoir that provides the drinking water for the Bay Area and incinerated some habitats for numerous bird species, like the spotted owl.
Now, the Monitor Change project is documenting what happens next.
The work involves creating a database of images from 2013 through the present to help study the ways that meadows, mountainsides and wooded areas are responding to the devastation.
Signs at vista points, in canyons, and at trailheads encourage visitors to post their pictures on Twitter, Instagram or Flickr with a specific hashtag. By clicking that hashtag, onlookers can view older posts from the same site. More importantly, agents from the Forest Service and participants from Wholly H20 and Nerds for Nature, two conservation-minded nonprofit groups, can add those pictures to an ongoing trove of images dating back to before the smoke cleared.
Pictures from the Rim of the World vista point, a scenic spot along Highway 120 outside Yosemite, help demonstrate the slow evolution.
This kind of photographic evidence can help environmental managers understand how sediment and water flow is affected after an ecological disaster, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A detailed understanding of the soil, for instance, and visualizing runoff water supplies, is “critical to maintaining safe drinking water and ecosystem health,” the USGS said in 2017.
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