Scientists from Lancaster University are appealing for volunteers for a citizen science project to help the delivery of humanitarian aid in in response to flooding in Mozambique.

The worst flooding in over two decades has occurred in Mozambique, destroying homes and critical infrastructure in the country. So far, the World Food Programme estimates over 500,000 people have been affected by the flooding, with communities cut off as roads become blocked.

Currently, rescue organisations are planning access routes to deliver aid in response to the event and need to understand which key access routes are accessible. To support them, this project aims to map road blockages along routes.

The Planetary Response Network (PRN) uses satellite and aerial image analysis to provide stakeholders with high-level situational awareness during and after humanitarian crises. During past deployments following environmental disasters, thousands of online volunteers have compared pre- and post-event satellite images to identify damage to infrastructure and buildings, access blockages, and signs of people in distress.

Alice Mead, PRN’s Humanitarian Outreach Officer, said: “We need to support humanitarian organisations who are trying to reach cut off communities due to flooding. We are focusing on road blockages to understand which access routes maybe cut off by widescale flooding in the south of Mozambique. This data will help humanitarian organisations to plan access routes for aid and rescue.”

Headed by Physics Professor Brooke Simmons, PRN is a humanitarian project hosted on Zooniverse and uses crowd-sourced data to inform humanitarian decision makers in the field. The project grew out of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, where members of the public are able to identify patterns in datasets that are too big for experts to examine themselves and too complex for computer algorithms and AI to label reliably.

Professor Simmons has been leading the humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in the Zooniverse since 2014, after realising that the skills needed to identify a new supernova are the same as those needed to identify the features most important to responders and decision makers, such as road blockages and structural damage.

If you can help by making classifications, please contact Zooniverse here.