Scientists from Lancaster University are developing a project to help humanitarian aid workers in Sudan avoid flooded areas when delivering supplies.

The project has grown out of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, where members of the public are able to identify patterns in datasets that are too big for experts to examine themselves and too complex for computer algorithms and AI to label reliably.

Lancaster Astrophysicist Dr Brooke Simmons, who is Deputy PI of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project, said: “Humans are very good at spotting things like complex spiral patterns in galaxies, or which of the changes between nightly images of the same part of the sky have a real exploding star in them, amidst any of the other things that can change, like a satellite passing overhead or a random cosmic ray hitting the detector.”

Dr Simmons has been leading the humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in the Zooniverse since 2014, after realising that the skills needed to identify a new supernova are the same as those needed to identify the features most important to responders and decision makers, such as road blockages and structural damage.

“In crisis mapping you ignore changes like debris in a field that is nowhere near a building or road, and only mark the things responders need to know about. The details are different, but the fundamental task is the same as in our astrophysical citizen science projects, or Zooniverse projects in other research fields.”

Now those same skills are being used to help create a map of road and riverbed crossings in Sudan, where the network of roads is crossed by riverbeds which flood during the rainy season. It is currently very hard to confidently predict which riverbeds will be flooded on any given day during the rainy season. As a result, humanitarian workers too often have to abort a trip to deliver aid, wasting time and resources.

“That task by itself will be very valuable for aid workers. Once the rainy season gets going this year, we are hoping to use the road-riverbed map to identify areas where we can focus monitoring efforts. The plan is to continue the project by asking volunteers to regularly check new imagery that’s available and see if we can rapidly identify new flooding in time to help aid workers on the ground plan their travel routes.”

For this project, the team, including Lancaster’s Humanitarian Outreach Officer Alice Mead, are working with Logistics Cluster who are coordinating the humanitarian logistics efforts in Sudan under the auspices of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). “Through coordination cells in Nairobi, Port Sudan, and N’Djamena, the Logistics Cluster is providing vital logistics information management and coordination support to partner organisations. The cluster has plotted over 200 wadis on LogIE (Logistics Information Exchange) along key supply routes that are likely to be affected during the rainy season and has developed a regional map showing the estimated physical access constraints that will be faced in Sudan, Chad, and South Sudan during peak rainy season to support supply chain and access strategies.

“We know where the roads are, but the wadi map is still incomplete, so we are asking volunteers to mark the crossings and to measure the lengths of roads that are crossed by the riverbeds. That will help partner organizations assess how severe future flooding might be, across the whole area they are trying to bring aid to, and for effective supply chain planning purposes”.

Alice Mead said: “We have worked closely with Logistics Cluster to identify the key need that the Zooniverse can help them meet, and we are excited to be partnering with them. This is a way of enabling the public to provide vital help even if they are far from Sudan and even if they can’t, for example, make a financial donation.”

Dr Simmons presented on “Lessons Learned from Applying Astrophysical Methods to Disaster Relief, and Vice-Versa” at the Royal Astronomical Society national meeting in 2024.