13 October 2012
Hacking for Humanity - New Hackathon starts on 13th of October 2012!
Drought is a key crisis even though it is much slower to unfold than many natural hazards. In terms of food security, accurate information is needed to see what areas are hardest hit and what crops and populations are affected when droughts occur. Furthermore, crop information is necessary for longer term food security assessments, i.e. how can we feed 9 billion people in the future? And how can we model competition for land in the future when there are increasing pressures from the food, feed and biofuel sectors? Accurate cropland information is needed for all of these purposes.
To date, maps of cropland are available from global land cover maps and there are some specific cropland maps created by various groups. However, when plotting these different maps on top of one another, considerable disagreement can be seen between them, both overall and spatially.
The focus of this hackathon challenge is Central African Republic. Cropland information for this country is currently poor since the two best cropland maps disagree almost completely on where cropland occurs.
For this hackathon no technical skills needs are required. You only need enthusiasm and the desire to contribute to a better map of cropland for Central African Republic using Google Earth.
The hackathon is running this week-end 13th/14th of October 2012.
Go to http://hackathon.geo-wiki.org/ to take part in the challenge.
Further questions:
Contact geo-wiki@iiasa.ac.at OR join our geo-wiki hackathon group on facebook.