Safecast
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Safecast is an international, volunteer-centered organization devoted to open citizen science for environmental monitoring. Safecast was established by Sean Bonner, Pieter Franken, and Joi Ito shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, following the Tōhoku earthquake on 11 March 2011 and manages a global open data network for ionizing radiation and air quality monitoring.
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Founded | 2011; 13 years ago (2011) |
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Founder | Sean Bonner, Joi Ito and Pieter Franken |
Focus | open citizen science |
Location |
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Method | volunteer based data collecting, open hardware development, online data network |
Key people | Sean Bonner, Joi Ito, Pieter Franken |
Volunteers | About 900 (End of 2016)[1] |
Website | safecast.org |
The Safecast team, with help of International Medcom, Tokyo hackerspace, and other volunteers, has designed various devices for radiation mapping. Haiyan Zhang developed a widely used interactive map of radiation levels around Japan, and was a mapping consultant in the formative phase of Safecast.[2] The Geiger counter-like devices developed include the bGeigie and bGeigie Nano for mobile applications (carborne and walking measurements) as well as fixed stations called Pointcast. Despite being a citizen science project, professional quality and scientific grade data was sought from the onset, and the methodology and tool-sets Safecast developed and deployed are cited in scientific literature and by governments.[3]
All data are collected via the Safecast API and are presented on the publicly available interactive Safecast Tile Map with global coverage.
Safecast later expanded to offer air quality sensors (PM1, PM2.5, PM10 μg/m3 particulate matter) which also report to open crowdsourced maps.
As of 2020 the project has made 120 million observations and calculated mean dose rates for 330 cities around the world.[4]