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App seeks to crowdsource data on land use change, damaged forests
Youths in South Sumatra have been encouraged to take part in efforts to restore degraded forests through a mobile application that crowdsources data on land use.
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A firefighter puts out a fire in a peatland area of South Sumatra. (JP/Yulia Savitri)
Youths in South Sumatra have been encouraged to take part in efforts to replant degraded forests through a mobile application that crowdsources data on land use change across the country.
Hidayah Hamzah, the project manager of RESTRORE+, the organization behind the initiative, said the app, called Urundata, was available on the Google Play store.
Hidayah said the project had started in November and would run until March. Participants, she said, would receive a status as #PahlawanData (data heroes).
“At the moment, we are aiming for 1.8 million participants, especially youths or university students,” she said, adding that the activity was conducted in four other provinces as well.
The data collected, she said, would form the basis for a land and forest restoration map that the government and other parties could use for restoration efforts.
She said forest restoration had to be conducted in an inclusive manner by involving the wider community, given that there were at least 14 million hectares of critical land nationwide, according to the Environment and Forestry Ministry, which is about 1.5 times the area of South Sumatra.
