The 2023 NASA Space Apps Challenge was held on October 7-8, 2023. This challenge is now closed.

Summary

NASA’s satellite-derived active fire data are freely available and provide valuable information to a wide range of users. However, as wildfires continue to increase in frequency, number, and size, the need for more diverse stakeholder groups to understand and use these data is rapidly expanding. Your challenge is to develop solutions to address fire and natural resource monitoring through innovative use of technology and publicly available data, enabling local communities to report and monitor fires and/or improve current data distribution.

Background

Satellite-derived active fire data and information are used by many stakeholder groups including national and regional governments, non-profit organizations, and the private sector to inform wildfire management activities. As wildfires continue to increase in frequency, number, and size, the need for more diverse stakeholder groups to understand and use these data is rapidly expanding.

Wildfires can have many negative impacts including a loss of biodiversity, poor air quality, increased soil erosion and landslides, increased number of invasive species, watershed contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions. These impacts often disproportionately affect local communities who reside near or in forests. Unique ways to access, adapt, and use active fire data to develop wildfire management solutions are needed to support community-based forest management. There are many ways that this diverse and expanding user base may use active fire data and information. For example, they may use this data to identify land encroachment activities (e.g., mining/deforestation into protected areas, encroachment into lands managed by indigenous peoples, etc.), quickly respond to new wildfires, modify agricultural practices, inform fire prevention, and to alert the community about a potential wildfire.

NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) makes global active fire data available within three hours of a satellite overpass. These data are generated from multiple spaceborne instruments including the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NOAA-20 spacecraft. While many stakeholders throughout the world already use this information, these data have the potential to further inform local communities on land management practices and activities.

Objectives

Your challenge is to develop solutions to address fire and natural resource monitoring through innovative use of technology and publicly available data, enabling local communities to report and monitor fires and/or improve current data distribution. Your solution can be technical or non-technical. For example, you could develop a smartphone app that can be used to attribute fire characteristics (e.g., forest type, source of fire, amount of damage, etc.). Or you could develop a tool that community members can use to quickly respond to wildfires, or to report publicly available information on areas of higher risk of fires because of droughts, other disturbances, or hazardous fuels. Your solution could identify areas that are experiencing soil erosion, enabling users to alert communities downstream about water contamination, or it could identify areas that need to be restored because of fire damage. Don’t forget that many communities may be rural and isolated or may require training to use the data. Think about how your solution can enable these communities to obtain these data (e.g., drones, local radio stations, etc.) and use them. Your solution will provide an additional tool to allow communities to monitor and manage forests!

Technical solutions could use various technologies including but not limited to machine learning, artificial intelligence, application programming interface (API) development, data science and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), image processing, and cloud services. Remember to present your solution so others can easily understand the problem and how your tool solves it—e.g., via text documentation with supporting images, a power point presentation, or a documentary-style video (3 minutes or less). .

Potential Considerations

You may (but are not required to) consider the following:

We welcome solutions to this challenge from both technical and non-technical teams.
Technical teams may provide a working concept solution such as fully executable code, working hardware, or a video demonstrating the functionality.
Non-technical teams may address the challenge through use of media (e.g., a documentary style video - 3 minutes or less) or a power point presentation.
Utilize the following file formats to present your solution: text files for source code, word/pdf files, power point presentations, or video file—it is recommended that you upload content to platforms that do not require others to download anything or create logins.
Your tool could potentially:
- Collect and distribute fire information to and from remote communities that do not have access to the Internet (e.g., using drones, radio stations, etc.), but provide the ability to upload the data to necessary locations where or when the Internet is available
- Validate and manage volunteer-collected data including uploaded images
- Offer solutions for data mining of social media platforms for fire related detections
- Enable uploaded geotagged image validation (AI- or community-based)
- Validate data points using NASA imagery/data if available (smaller fires may not be detected by satellites), and assign a confidence value [0-100] to each submitted point or area
- Validate/confirm satellite fire detections on the ground
- Provide a visual manual on how to manage a fire and stay safe
- Offer other methods to protect community resources and prevent wildfires utilizing mapping applications
You may also consider the following:
- How could you protect the identity of the person collecting data?
- What technology would you use to send out alerts if email is not available?
- How would you provide multilingual support for the application (English along with other languages)?
- Can you expand the application to protect other resources, ensure water quality, enable forest management, or detect invasive species?
- How can you present data to non-scientists so they understand it and counter climate data misinformation?
If you develop API code and libraries they should be easily adaptable for others to use, so remember to clearly define your inputs and outputs.

Consider following these general steps to address this challenge, and utilizing power point, documentary-style video (3 minutes or less), or a word/pdf document with images to document your solution:

Define your problem
Explain why you chose to solve this problem and introduce your team
Propose a solution
Provide a list of resources needed (e.g., software, software libraries, hardware, etc.)
Present your solution
Explain potential issues with your solution, (e.g., lack of time to finish, will not work if it rains, etc.)
Mention any challenges you experienced when working on the problem
Summarize what you learned
Propose ideas for future improvements

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

Managing Fire: Increasing Community-based Fire Management Opportunities