A picture of huge swathes of greenery flickers on the smartphone screen. A question pops up: Do you see primary natural forest in more than half of the picture?
And just like in the Tinder dating app, swipe left or right to answer. Feeling doubtful? Then head over to another area, and hunt for the answer in a Pokemon-Go style game.
It is through these games that the new interactive app, Urundata, by land project Restore+, hopes to marshal minds to help save tropical rainforests in Indonesia, the world’s largest after the Amazon and Congo basins, and support indigenous communities.
Launched in November 2019, the crowdsourcing app has gained more than 800 users contributing to nearly three million interpretations of publicly available satellite images.
“The main attraction is that they compete, collect points and win,” Mr Ping Yowargana, a coordinator at Restore+, said.
The consortium of organisations behind the Restore+ project in Indonesia is led by Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and comprises US environment think-tank World Resources Institute (WRI), Nairobi-based research group, the World Agroforestry Centre, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
The consortium hopes to garner four million interpretations of the images by the middle of next month through Pilahpilih, the Tinder-like game.
The Pokemon Go-style game, Jelantara, which requires users to answer questions based on field observations, is set for launch in April.
Indonesia has long struggled to fight against massive deforestation, caused by rampant illegal logging and land clearing for plantations to grow commodities like oil palm. Land conflicts between companies and local communities are also widespread.
Mr Ping said the data collected by Urundata will be transparent and can be used by any party. It will be published on the Urundata website, he said.
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Source: The Straits Times, 25 February 2020