Scientists from Lancaster University are appealing for volunteers to help a citizen science project helping the delivery of humanitarian aid in the wake of hurricane Melissa.

Headed by Physics Professor Brooke Simmons, the Planetary Response Network (PRN) is a humanitarian project hosted on Zooniverse and uses crowd-sourced data to inform humanitarian decision makers in the field.

The 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.

Professor Simmons said: “After an event like this, there are so many people who want to help, but don’t have the financial resources or the time to volunteer in person. Our project provides a way for people to help responders in their spare time, without having to leave home.”

The project is currently focusing on humanitarian access routes in the Caribbean after the hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica, leaving a trail of devastation. The hurricane caused huge amounts of damage to buildings and roads alongside flooding before going on to hit Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

For this project, the team, including Lancaster’s Humanitarian Outreach Officer Alice Mead, are working with Logistics Cluster, which is coordinating the humanitarian logistics efforts in the Caribbean under the auspices of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Alice said: “We have been asked to support the response with vital data on humanitarian aid access routes. This project focuses on identifying road blockages and damage to infrastructure such as bridges, airports and ports. We need lots of support from volunteers to classify the data.”

The PRN 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.