Chara

Help pastoralist communities around the world preserve their livelihood, by providing them access to information and resources (e.g grass land, water, safe routes) to prepare and support their migration journey.

The objective of the project is to design a working prototype for a mobile application which provides pastoralists community with information on land monitoring: water availability, grassland, and assist communities in networking.

Traditionally, NASA is known for looking out into space and examining problems beyond our own planet. But, let’s turn these satellites back to us for a moment and solve problems here at home.

Problem :

A pastoralist is, in essence, a nomadic shepherd.

It is estimated that there are over 300 million pastoralists, approximately 13 times the population of Australia. And currently, they are in danger.

Industrialism has taken away their traditional grazing lands, and fixed them in place. When pastoralists are locked down, they can’t roam the countryside to find food.

As countries develop their infrastructure, transition away from an agrarian society, and fill in more land with houses, factories and roads, the traditional grazing routes of pastoralists are disappearing. Without routes along which they can move their livestock, they are forced to settle down in a single spot.

Their animals quickly over-graze, eroding the topsoil, and begin to seek food elsewhere, annoying local community members, and causing in many cases, violent conflict. This extends far beyond the local level. In many countries, pastoralists have shaped the country and the ecosystem, much like aboriginals have shaped the Australian landscape. Without their movement around regions, biodiversity crumbles.

Solution : Presenting Chara

'Chara' in Hindi, means pasture.

Chara is a simple symbol based app to determine quality of foliage and water that is suitable for pastoralism. Scientific and satellite imagery and maps do not provide us information on quality. This is best achieved through leveraging local knowledge and real time reporting of pastoralists.

With Chara, we plan to access public mapping data, and process it with an algorithm to produce a medium resolution heatmap of vegetation density. This produces a visually intuitive method to communicate avenues of travel to pastoralists, where literacy levels are critically low.

After the initial map seed, users will be able to interact, report quality of grass and water and help update the heatmap to increase the resolution, and accuracy.

Additionally, Chara only requires sporadic access to the internet. After the initial install, it will cache local map and heat data for a given area, allowing offline access. Reports and updates saved by the users themselves will be stored locally until internet access is restored, which will then be processed, and update the heatmap for all users. Critical updates, such as natural disasters and bandit hotspots will also use an SMS based solution to update and inform pastoralists unable to get access to the internet.

We have a working prototype, but our work does not stop here.

Use Case :

We plan to target remote pastoralists in northern india as a test case. Many NGOs are already working actively in these regions to alleviate poverty conditions, and we hope to obtain funding to provide a number of cheap, affordable smartphones to pastoral families in the region. If our heatmap proves successful in this trial case, we will have solid data with which to seek further funding to implement this cost effective solution.

From there, scaling is only a matter of time, and the marginal cost of branching out to other vulnerable pastoralist communities will be almost negligible.

1. NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) satellite imagery

2. CartoDB for mapping dynamic generated data

3. Technology: Angular JS, Ionic Framework for mobile app

4. Data from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

5. OpenWeatherMap for Live Local Weather