Read the full post at Grist.
This is part of a series exploring how collective intelligence can create a better world. Read the first post here.
Picture this: You’re out on a hike in Mt. Diablo State Park, just outside San Francisco. Upon reaching a nice viewpoint, you think, “Hey, this would look pretty sweet on my Instagram feed.” So you whip out the ol’ iPhone to snap a selfie. Then you notice a sign with an L-shaped bracket next to it. The sign asks you to fit your phone into the frame, pointing your camera lens at the drab brown hill across the way, take a photo and upload it to Flickr, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag #morganfire01.
“Why would anyone want a picture of that?” you ask.
Turns out, it’s a project that was put together by Nerds for Nature, a group of civic hackers who do good for the Earth by connecting researchers, enviros, and tech whizzes to figure out new ways to protect our planet. The Mt. Diablo project is designed to monitor the area’s ecological recovery after it was toasted by a wildfire last September. Once you tag and upload the photos, researchers can easily compile them into a crowdsourced time-lapse series that will show the process of vegetation growing back. As wildfires become increasingly common with climate change, a project like this could help researchers determine the longer-term impacts these fires will have.