Students Help Map Gulf Oil Spill

With 210,000 gallons of oil flowing into the ocean each day from a BP oil rig, fisherman, boat captains and onshore residents are seeing and smelling the damage that the spill is causing about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. And with open source software, graduate students at Tulane University are recording their observations on an Oil Spill Crisis Map they created.

The students partnered with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB) and Radical Designs on the map, which uses information from texts, tweets, e-mails and online submissions that citizens send in to plot the effects of the oil spill.

This method of outsourcing, called crowdsourcing, consists of contracting tasks out to a large group of people or community through an open call. Using this method, LABB, a New Orleans-based environmental health and justice nonprofit, is collecting and posting reports about the spill as well as suggesting solutions. Specifically, it tracks locations with an oil sheen, oil onshore; affected birds, marine and other wildlife; odor; health effects; smoke; birds; damaged property and threatened livelihood.

In Professor Nathan Morrow's Geographic Information Systems classes, students created the Oil Spill Crisis Map based on Ushahidi (pronounced “ooh-sha-hee-dee”) open source software. LABB already wanted an Ushahidi for reporting environmental hazards, and Morrow’s students initially helped modify the application for this purpose.

Because the architecture from this project already was in place when the oil spill occurred, the focus shifted from general environmental hazard reporting in the state to specifically reporting on the spill. “It was timing and coincidence that the students were still there, still available,” Morrow said. “They just took it and inched it up to the application you see now.”

When a citizen sees, for instance, an oil-covered sea turtle on the shore, he or she can text, e-mail, tweet or report that information online to LABB. Those reports are automatically added to the map, and LABB has someone on shift every hour to look at those reports and make sure they’re legitimate, said Anne Rolfes, LABB's founding director. They mark them as verified if they’re in line with what LABB is hearing from others in the region. “If it’s something completely new that we haven’t heard,” Rolfe said, “we’ll either wait to get more reports on the subject or we’ll go look in the news and see if it's being reported in the larger media.”

Each eyewitness report requires a description and location information, such as address, city and state, zip-code or coordinates, and citizen reporters can remain anonymous or disclose their contact information. Photos and video also can be uploaded via the Web.

The current map at LABB’s website is a very early version and will get much better as more functionality is added, Morrow said. “The students are still interested,” he said, “and there’s a whole lot more you can do with the reporting and the way things are presented and organized.”

Ushahidi essentially is a suite of applications that connect to each other — something Morrow describes as bringing mobile computing together with geographic summary tools.  “It’s sort of dynamic mapping,” he said. “It’s this juncture of two technologies that were meant to be together.”

The creators put all the applications that make those connections into a piece of software that’s downloadable, and it does have some out-of-the-box type of functionality. Because Ushahidi is open source, users such as the Tulane students can access and change the code to make their map exactly what they want it to be. “You can change the titles, colors, even the functionality without permission,” Morrow said. “It’s licensed under Creative Commons, so you can change it in any way you want.”

So the GIS students downloaded the software, which requires a few things to use. First, it needs its own server — an Ubuntu server, to be exact. Second, someone with PHP (an open-source scripting language) coding experience must be involved to alter the code. In the case of Tulane and LABB, one student had these skills, so he customized and embedded the map into LABB’s website.

“We never could have done this if there hadn’t been a GIS class at Tulane that worked on this for us,” Rolfe said. “And this is also a partnership with the Tulane Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy.”

Morrow’s GIS classes became involved because they must do a project that uses their GIS skills and is relevant to something local. Rolfes sent a LABB representative to pitch the case to Morrow’s students. “I think 7 of the 12 formed a little team,” he said, “and that was really exciting — a big group excited in the same thing. They really pushed it a lot further than a single person would.”

As for the future, some of Morrow’s students have thought about how to apply these technologies to different problems. “Another group of students is applying it to the issue of having enough hospital beds and where they’re distributed around the state,” he said. “They’re already talking about putting together their own consulting firm to do jobs like this.”