Page - 23 - in options, Volume winter 2019

Crowdsourcing apps have empowered users to find more efficient routes of transportation, better deals on accommodation, and much more. Now, there is an app that can improve everyday city life by crowdsourcing information on everything from a great restaurant for a date, to cool spots perfect for escaping heatwaves. In any urban environment, there are open spaces that can be used in a variety of ways. The new CityOases app lets users pick an activity and then displays where they can find a suitable place for it in the city according to other users, who can upload ratings and pictures. Users can also add new locations to the map and contribute their opinions around noise, cleanliness, and other criteria. The CityOases app currently focuses on Vienna and is a pilot project coordinated by IIASA as part of the LandSense Citizen Observatory, an international research project funded by the European Commission. The goal of the project is to stimulate civic engagement, foster citizen-powered science, and advance environmental monitoring practices. The hope is that the data from CityOases can be used to foster the distribution, diversity, and quality of green and open spaces. "There are many challenges to healthy, happy living in the modern, urban environment,” explains Inian Moorthy, a researcher in the IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program. “The goal of the CityOases app is to address some of these challenges using crowdsourced data to revive green spaces and promote sustainable urban development.” Pest outbreaks can have devastating effects on the overall health of any ecosystem and wipe out entire crops or forests. Furthermore, these pests can wreak havoc on the local economies that depend on an ecosystem for food, agriculture, or other resources. According to recent research, pest outbreaks are driven largely by ecological processes acting at different spatial scales. The evidence also suggests that causes for pest outbreaks are far more complex than any one particular reason. Factors such as weather, landscape topology, and food availability can all contribute to an outbreak. As such, finding a way to solve this problem requires an equally complex and multi-fold approach. Matthias Wildemeersch, a researcher in the Advanced Systems Analysis Program contributed to a study in which a network model was developed to analyze and manage pest outbreaks across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Unlike previous statistical models, this analytical model takes into account pest dynamics on a smaller scale as well as larger-scale factors, such as landscape topology and connectivity. The researchers discovered that outbreaks can only be captured correctly if the interaction between landscape topology and host-pest dynamics is well understood. "Accounting for how habitat patches interact with one another is key to understanding if a pest outbreak is likely to occur and then spread through a landscape,” explains Wildemeersch. “An important implication of this multi-scale network model is its use in forest management to optimally mitigate the spreading potential of a pest.” Network representation of the habitat patches and their connectivity of the spruce bark beetle in the Bavarian Forest National Park. Protecting against pest outbreaks through modeling E U R O P E Improving urban landscapes through crowdsourcing Regional impacts Matthias Wildemeersch: wildemee@iiasa.ac.at Inian Moorthy: moorthy@iiasa.ac.at Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/16014 Further info: www.landsense.eu By Jeremy Summers By Jeremy Summers 23Optionswww.iiasa.ac.at Winter 2019/20