An Exploratory Assessment of a Smartphone Application for Public Participation in Forest Fuels Measurement in the Wildland-Urban Interface

Abstract

Wildfire management in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) protects property and life from wildland fire. One approach that has potential to provide information about the amount and location of fuels to forest managers and, at the same time, increase public knowledge and engagement in reducing wildfire threats is public participation in scientific research (PPSR)-also known as citizen science-where members of the public participate in the research process. In this exploratory study, residents of a wildfire-affected community tested a smartphone application to collect data about forest fuels and answered questions about wildfire, their community, and experiences using the application. In this paper, the application is introduced, the volunteers' motivations, attitudes, and behaviors are considered, and the potential of using a PPSR approach for wildfire management discussed. Although there are practical challenges to applying PPSR approaches to wildfire hazard management, the participants in this study demonstrated the potential of PPSR to increase awareness and understanding of actions that can reduce the threat of wildfire. OPEN ACCESSForests 2013, 4 1200Wildfire managers may consider utilizing PPSR approaches to engage the community in wildfire preparedness.

Volunteered Geographic Information in Natural Hazard Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review of Current Approaches with a Focus on Preparedness and Mitigation

“…Only the journal "Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences" appears twice [35,39]. The journals represent several research areas (e.g., International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment [40], Forests [41], Remote Sensing [38]), and thus, a broad variety of audiences are addressed by the articles.…”

“…Overall, the majority of studies are located in North America [39][40][41]43,45] and in Europe [15,35,38,44]. Only one research study is based in Africa [18].…”

“…Furthermore, seven papers use data that are gathered in a specific country [15,35,[38][39][40][41]43], while in two cases several countries are addressed [18,44]. The remaining studies apply platforms that collect and provide their data on a global level [42,45].…”

“…Schnebele and Cervone [39], Silvestro et al [35], Wan et al [45] and Dorn, Vetter and Höfle [38] form the largest group and present methods to cope with floods, while Enenkel et al [18] focus on agricultural droughts. De Longueville et al [15], Ferster and Coops [43] and Ferster et al [41] deal with forest fires, whereas tsunamis are covered by Middleton et al [44], who deal with several hazard types. Moreover, the characteristics of the hazards are relevant for the methods and the VGI that can be used.…”

“…A drought is temporally slow, which suggests monitoring processes [18], while in a flood that extends over a certain area, pictures can be used as a base for modelling or as ground data, e.g., modelling the flood extent in order to find elements at risk [35,39,45]. Finally, an earthquake, tsunami, fire, storm or volcanic eruption can occur suddenly, and therefore, it is necessary to have up-to-date data about hazard-prone or previously-affected areas to be adequately prepared and to conduct mitigation activities [15,41,43,44]. These examples show the diverse options that exist for the selection of tools and data types, as well as the tasks that the crowd is asked to perform.…”