Sensors and Crowdsourcing for Environmental Awareness and Emergency Planning

This paper proposes a participatory open environmental planning framework where environmental monitoring, environmental awareness and response planning combine high-tech sensors and “crowdsourcing” (with humans serving as a kind of sensor) to shift environmental planning away from government-centric planning. The authors present a prototype system of an open platform that has been initiated at the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission as a shared service for the regional municipal governments’ environmental emergency planning and response. It includes modules such as ocean surge flood alerting, air quality and water quality alerting, citizen incident reporting, forums and citizens’ volunteer resource sharing. Sending notifications to mobile devices and merging distributed sensor measurements with observations from the field to create a higher level of awareness about the local environment may be the beginning of a more effective way to solve long-term environmental problems.