This crowdsourced map helps people find the kind of bathroom they need

An experiment in upstate New York showed how town officials could maintain clean and safe roads during the winter season and protect the environment. By using a salt brine before winter storms, they were able to plow the roads more efficiently and, at the same time, reduce the amount of salt going into waterways that could impact freshwater ecosystems. The effort, launched by the nonprofit FUND for Lake George, required “a culture shift within the towns’ maintenance departments,” but the communities were able to cut their salt usage in half over two years.

Tree mapping helps researchers understand deforestation and climate change, however the technologies used often miss trees that aren’t clustered. Researchers, in collaboration with NASA, used high-resolution satellite images, previously only available to commercial entities, to find a surprisingly large number of trees in the Sahara Desert. Using AI deep learning and one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at the University of Illinois, they identified more than 1.8 billion trees, manually marking nearly 90,000 so the computer could “learn” which shapes and shadows indicated the presence of trees.

To quickly distribute money to poverty-stricken areas in Togo during the coronavirus pandemic, the country's government turned to mobile cash payments. Working with a nonprofit and UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action, Togo established a system of mobile payments to reach 30,000 of Togo’s poorest people who were identified via satellite imagery and image analysis algorithms.

Rwanda’s Akagera National Park, once a conservation failure, has been revitalized with fences, patrols, and new technology to become a successful wildlife park. The government partnered with conservation group African Parks to manage the national park, which has led to an increase tourists, patrols, and even lions and black rhinos. Akagera also became the world first “Smart Park” after it installed a telecommunications network called LoRaWAN to securely track, monitor, and communicate between rangers, vehicles, equipment, and animals.

Women in GIS Kenya created a digital tool that helps the government track the number of Covid-19 cases, recoveries, and confirmed deaths, as well as the number of tests administered. The online database combines a survey that assesses a person's symptoms with cellphone GPS data to create a map of current hot spots and recommend treatment locations. The government credits the tool, which can also predict high-risk areas vulnerable to future outbreaks, with helping to keep Kenya's COVID-19-related deaths relatively low compared to other countries. The tool is popular among younger, tech-savvy populations.

In Whitehall, Montana, a senior center and a nonprofit that helps rehabilitate individuals with brain injuries joined together to enhance public transportation services for "multiple constiuencies," including rural, elderly populations and for those who are living with a disability. Although Whitehall Public Transportation was not immediately popular, in 2019, over 27,000 riders utilized this new, free service to run errands, travel to appointments and local events or just to meet other community members.

A partnership between Facebook and the Ministry of Health in Kenya has helped connect blood banks with blood donors. The process uses artificial intelligence and geo-location data to notify Facebook users who have signed up as blood donors when blood banks in their area are in need of donations.

Identifying the metagenomic sequencing for new outbreaks of viruses can help to better assess how the virus is spreading, which in turn helps health officials figure out how to slow down the contagion. In the midst of a coronavirus outbreak, a tool that was first used to during the SARS outbreak is now being used to track Covid-19 in under-resourced places such as Cambodia.

The underrepresentation of women in technology and computer science has led to the creation of Geochicas, a group of women who recruit and train female, open source mappers across the world. Open source mapping is a male-dominated pursuit but one that informs urban design and public policy. When mapping a city, women tend to add services that are overlooked by men, such as childcare services, hospitals, and women's health clinics. Diversifying the volunteers who do this work to include more women leads to mapping that is more inclusive and minimizes crowdsourced-data bias against women.

A space-based initiative called Global Fishing Watch is using satellite imagery and data to hold companies accountable to their promise of providing sustainable sourced seafood. While the volume of data and cost of obtaining it can be a challenge, the organization has partnered with key collaborators to help with the effort. Countries like Indonesia and Panama are working with them to stop illegal fishing.