International Natural Disasters Research and Analytics (INDRA) Reporter: A multi-platform Citizen Science Framework and Tools for Disaster Risk Reduction

With pervasive access to mobile phones with powerful sensors and processors, crowdsourcing has become increasingly prominent as a means of supplementing data obtained from traditional sensors. But there is a lack of a comprehensive application programming interface (API)-based framework that can collect data from multiple sources through user-friendly workflows. INDRA Reporter has been designed with a mobile-first approach geared towards real-time applications and an emphasis on user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX) to maximize collection of higher fidelity data. This paper details a comprehensive suite of tools for active and passive crowdsensing of natural hazards such as floods, storm, lightning, rain etc. Currently the framework includes mobile applications, telegram chatbots, and a publicly available dashboard. Most citizen science applications in flooding are quantitative, which makes it difficult for non-specialists to provide accurate scientific information along with providing user insight into prevailing situation within a single coherent workflow. It is imperative that workflows targeting dangerous situations emphasize on speed and visual acuity while collecting critical data.  The main objective of INDRA is to provide a simple and intuitive way of collecting qualitative and quantitative data from people. Since traditional data collection through ground-based sensors and satellites suffer from various limitations, measurements collected using INDRA will supplement these sources and form the basis of developing multi-sensor data products. We are reporting the development and release of four components of the framework – a) open INDRA API b) INDRA Reporter mobile application, c) Telegram Chat bot, and d) web dashboard. The API has been kept extensible in order to expand the data collection to other hydrologic and meteorological phenomenon.