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The Surfrider Foundation of San Clemente, CA, USA, is dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s ocean, waves and beaches, for all people, through a powerful activist network. Their irreplaceable national network of chapter volunteers serves as the first response to local threats in coastal communities across the US. The Surfrider Foundation is working directly with the Unified Command, U.S. Coast Guard, CDFW, and local government agencies to ensure a complete and comprehensive clean up of the recent oil spill off the coast of Southern California.
The goal of this project was to launch an ArcGIS Hub that leverages Surfrider’s network to identify locations for the cleanup effort and engages the public over the coming weeks and months as oil continues to wash ashore. The Surfrider Foundation wanted to use ArcGIS Online Crowdsource Manager, Survey123, and ArcGIS Dashboards or StoryMaps to best display the collected data. Mallory Stermon, a GISCorps volunteer in Phoenix, AZ, was selected for this project.
Surfrider had set up a basic Hub site previous to the start of this project and needed assistance with building up the site. Several components were added, which included a project accessible to the public, directions and examples for submitting data, a map to display the results, a verification tool, and some general statistics. The Hub page was divided into sections to help with organizing the website to include separate pages: Home, About, Volunteer, and Progress. Mallory’s work was mostly focused on developing the Volunteer page, the Progress pages, and the verification tool.
The Volunteer page contains information available to the public on how to submit useful data. QuickCapture was first used for data collection, but after some users expressed difficulty with downloading the app, an additional form using Survey123 was added. Users can choose which platform to use. The first portion of the Volunteer page includes a link to download QuickCapture and add the Surfrider project, as well as a link to a web form using Survey123. On the second part of the page, a StoryMap was added with tips for taking photos that would be more useful to the organization. It is recommended to take multiple pictures to show the location on the beach, a close-up of the contamination, and with an object to show the relative size of the contamination.
Once a photo gets submitted, it has to be verified before it is visible on the website. ArcGIS Online has a crowdsource manager that is available but difficult to tailor for specific needs. Instead, an Instant App was created and built as an editor for checking photos as they are submitted. Through the app, data can be filtered by status and edited to be accepted or denied. Accepted photos automatically get published to the Hub site, while denied photos do not contribute to the dataset. After the project was started, an attribute was added to track the cleanup status for each submission. This attribute can now also be edited using the editor.
The last piece for the website was to display the published data. An interactive Dashboard was created to show the location of all published photos and some basic statistics, including a timeline of when data was submitted. Users can click on individual data points to view the submitted photos. This dashboard was put onto the Progress page on the Hub site.
State and federal agencies (CA Dept of Fish and Wildlife and US Coast Guard) create oil spill contingency plans for each area, and these plans recognize the role non-governmental organizations play as stakeholders who are critical to the success of an oil spill clean up effort. With a network of activists with “feet on the beach”, Surfrider could see the shortcomings with the public tipline/inbox that the state had set up. Through its volunteers, Surfrider provided more, complete, higher-quality data to the agencies responsible for the actual cleanup, including matching the location of public observations with the official shoreline segment designations used by state and federal agencies. The agencies requested that each picture get coded with their Coastline IDs and that they receive a daily email with new data. To accomplish this, an API was created to join the data and create an HTML table, which was then automatically sent in an email.
Overall, the project has been a success. Surfrider was able to deliver gathered data to government stakeholders in large volumes on a consistent schedule. The organization is now seeing the advantages of incorporating GIS principles and ArcGIS tools and is considering them for future projects.
Project Completed
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