Awards & Nominations
Space Yinzers has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
Space Yinzers: Vulnerable Alaska
High-Level Project Summary
At times, scientific data can feel as mysterious and beautiful as the myriad stars in the night sky. Our challenge, Take Flight: Making the Most of NASA's Airborne Data, strives to connect the populace with the true meaning of NASA's airborne research studies. We found this in the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) Campaign, in a research study that analyzed the impact of spending money to prepare for Alaskan fires and how it saves Alaska resources in the long run. We developed a web app that shows the way ABoVE has mapped Alaskan fires and how prevention will have a positive value for Alaska. Being able to easily visualize this impact may help in public understanding.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
We compiled NASA’s ABoVE data to contrast the effects of monetary resources put into managing Alaska’s wildfires. We have a map on the left side visualizing Alaskan wildfires in a given wildfire management scenario. On the right, we had three line graphs visualizing the effects of cost minimizing management and the total area burned.
The goal of this project is to easily visualize how vulnerable to monetary wildfire management spending that Alaska is.This project would be beneficial for climate change scientists specializing in wildfire management, environmental activists , local Alaskan authorities, as well as Alaska natives.
For building the website, we used front end languages including HTML, CSS, Javascript. For the geographical visualization of Alaskan wildfires, we used a Javascript library called Leaflet. We were also using geoJSON to create a visual overlay of the back end data onto the map. For the back end data analysis, we used R to analyze the raw data files.
Space Agency Data
We used NASAs ABoVE data that displayed the count of Alaskan wildfires ever since they have been tracked. We used this in the back end to create a visual overlay on top of a map of Alaska. We were also compiling this visualization with graphics displaying the amount spent managing wildfires, burned areas, and the money put into wildfire management.
Hackathon Journey
Christopher Brown's suggestion to divide and conquer at the beginning of the project spurred our team to dive deeper into three of the campaigns to find a study that truly called to us. His guidance and mentorship, along with a nonjudgemental sense of humility helped the newer programmers and designers in the team to flourish. In addition, thank you to Michael for running and mentoring the team at the Pittsburgh location. His advice, support and silly jokes created an environment where we felt safe to tackle new challenges, and drove us to want to do our best.
References
We utilized data from Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) and the open access research paper The costs and benefits of fire management for carbon mitigation in Alaska through 2100 by Molly Elder et al 2022 Environ. Res. Lett.17 105001.
Tags
#map #climatechange #Alaska