Engaging a highly-qualified crowd in an information system for natural hazards in mountain areas

In recent times, we find an increasing number of people exploring mountain areas where they expose themselves to a variety of hazardous natural processes (e.g., rock fall, collapsing seracs, landslides, or torrential floods) and adverse conditions (e.g., eroded trails). Ongoing climate change with its destabilizing impact on glaciers and permafrost makes such hazards even more ubiquitous. Moreover, remote mountain areas are not covered by standardized management schemes for natural hazards and there is usually no systematic monitoring. However, many relevant observations are made by experienced alpine professionals (such as guides, rescue teams, park rangers, geoscientists etc.). The “AlpsWatch” project intends to build on co-creation of information by this “highly-qualified crowd” to establish an interactive information platform for natural hazards in a mountainous pilot region (Tyrol, Austria). The project develops and implements an easy-to-use mobile app where expert users can readily document and share their qualified field observations. The collected observations are synchronized and structured in a spatio-temporal database, which, in turn, can be accessed by the expert users. Thereby, the project contributes to more informed decision making on the mountain and during planning of activities and, thus, enables mountain professionals to enhance the safety of themselves and of their clients. A focus of the project will be on standardization and structuring of the observations, as well as on possibilities to automatically trigger requests for human intervention via quality checks, further investigation, or warning via authorities. We are also investigating possibilities to combine the crowd-based field observations with remote sensing and geomorphological process models. Thereby, we aim to improve the understanding of geomorphological dynamics and to develop more advanced and spatially continuous information products for natural hazards in mountain areas.