Planetary Response Network: Hurricane Melissa 2025

The questions below are commonly asked and should give you the information you need to decide whether to participate, as well as help you do so more effectively.

If you are in distress and need or want support, there are many options depending on where you are located in the world. Here is a list of international crisis support hotlines that you can contact.

What will I be doing if I participate in this project?
In the PRN, we ask participants to examine satellite images of an area. We will be identifying road, bridge, airport and port damage along key access routes in the Caribbean. Practically speaking, this means you are using the web to look at small sections of a satellite image at a time and to annotate these images (by answering questions about them or using a marking tool to mark certain pixels).

Why are we marking these features?
We are marking road blockages, and damage to infrastructure to help the Logistics Cluster plan humanitarian aid access routes in the Caribbean. By identifying if roads, bridges, airports and ports are functional or damaged, the Logistics Cluster can make more informed decisions on the routes they take to distribute aid. Specifically, this data is in response to Hurricane Melissa.

By asking participants on the web to help, we can gather this information and deliver it more quickly to responder organisations on the ground. The features we ask participants to identify vary based on the needs of our partner responders. To find out more details about why we are asking you to identify these particular features, check the About page (tab at the top of the page).

What do organisations on the ground do with our classifications?
Once our team aggregates everyone's responses into a map with the consensus about each area, the data will be used plan effective routes for humanitarian aid. This is helpful to the Logistics Team, which can use this data to plan access routes for delivering humanitarian aid. For specific examples of how volunteers' classifications have been used in the past, check out our Results Page for the 2017 PRN Caribbean Response.

Because of how many people pitch in to help, and because we tend to use more zoomed-out images than, say, an aerial survey from a plane, we can often provide maps covering a larger area than would otherwise be available. Even though that means the details are sometimes harder to see, a coarser map showing the evolving situation regarding large-scale features like floods, landslides across roads, etc. is very valuable.

What if I don't want to participate?
No problem; you don't have to. When people choose to participate in a project, the project is governed by the Zooniverse's project policies, and each person's participation is governed by the Zooniverse's user agreement and privacy policy. You may want to read those in further detail to learn more. The basic idea is: you can stop your participation at any time, for any reason.

Are my contributions anonymous?
They can be. You don't need to register for a Zooniverse account in order to participate in a project. If you don't register, your contributions are anonymous and you will not receive any acknowledgment for them in publications and other outputs. If you choose to register, you can still do so anonymously by using an anonymous email address and choosing an anonymous username.

If you would like to receive "credit" for your contributions, you can optionally include a "Credited Name" in your Zooniverse profile, which we will use to acknowledge your contributions, for example on our Team page and in publications. This is completely optional. For more information, see the Zooniverse's user agreement and privacy policy.

How secure is the data I provide when I participate?
The data collected on this website is stored by the Zooniverse, not directly by the project team. Full details about data storage and security are given in the Zooniverse's user agreement and privacy policy. That page also includes contact information for the data controller. The Zooniverse provides project data to the project team for analysis in anonymised form: usernames are shared, but not emails or unhashed IP addresses. The reason usernames are shared where available is that this helps us to ensure high quality aggregated data is passed to the responders on the ground, e.g. by removing duplicate classifications and identifying user accounts that are actually bots providing inaccurate information (both of these are rare).

Where will the outcomes of this project be published?
We update participants and the public about project outcomes in many ways:

• We share aggregated results with responders on the ground. Our partner responder organisations may decide to further share the information with other responders and decision makers, if they feel doing so would aid in response efforts.
• We share ongoing and final outcomes on our project's Results page and on various Talk pages, here at this website.
• We share ongoing and final outcomes in project newsletters, which are sent to registered participants who have opted to receive e-mail communications from the Zooniverse.
• We share information and results with the press when requested and if we deem it appropriate (e.g. if it is likely to help improve the quality of the response on the ground by bringing attention).
• We publish outcomes in various formats, including writing our own press releases and incorporating results into scholarly articles.

How will my contributions be acknowledged?
We work on this project as a team and we consider all our participants team members; once the initial phase of the response is mature enough to do so, we will publish a list of registered participants (with credited names where supplied by the participants, otherwise with usernames) on our Team page. If there are multiple phases of the project, we will also update the acknowledgments with a final list of team members once the project is complete.

Ok, I've decided to participate. I need some examples!
Check the Field Guide (tab to the right of the screen). As the project progresses, Talk may also be a good source of examples. The team will usually 'pin' the most helpful/informative posts so they always show up at the top of the page.

I don't see roads or infrastructure, but I could have missed something.
We know that not all images are high-resolution enough to spot all kinds of damage. For instance, in 3-meter resolution images, you can spot major road blockages and catastrophic structural damage, but if there's only partial damage to a roof, it will probably not be visible. When you click "No Damage Detected", you are saying that within the limits of the image quality you do not detect damage. You are not promising that you are 100% sure there is no damage whatsoever. We consider the image resolution and quality when creating damage maps, so that responders on the ground also know what we can't see.

Which image is 'Before' and which is 'After'?
These are usually explicitly labeled, but not always. If there is no label, before is the first image (left button filled) and after is the second image (right button filled).

How should I mark extended/odd shapes?
If a flood, blocked road etc. is larger than the point marker, please just mark its center. Only add a second mark if it looks like a separate flood, blockage etc. Sometimes the shape of a flood (for example) makes the center hard to identify; just do your best to estimate its location. If there are a lot of damaged buildings, please evaluate each one individually.

The image is only sea/ocean. What do I do?
We've tried to remove as many of these as possible, but there are still some ocean-only images. Click the "unclassifiable" tickbox and then hit done to flag these images so that our team can make sure they're retired quickly from the active data set.

The image is unclassifiable due to cloud/missing image areas. What do I do?
If the image is completely unclassifiable tick the "This image is unclassifiable (cloud cover, missing image areas, etc.)" box below the marking options and click "Done". (If there is no "unclassifiable" tickbox, just click Done.) If only part of the image is unclassifiable, just classify what you can see.

Note: The imaging software may try to mark clouds with brightly colored regions, and it very rarely marks non-cloudy portions, but it often misses clouds.

These images are very hard to classify. I'm getting frustrated.
If you're getting frustrated or stressed, it's ok to take a break! With many people working together, everyone can step back when they need to and step in when they're ready.

We know some of these datasets are very challenging, but that's exactly why we need your help! Computer algorithms aren't good enough on their own to do this, but people are very good. We know from past projects that our community is very accurate at spotting even subtle signs of changes, and telling those apart from differences that are only due to varying conditions like time of day (shadow length), cloud/haze cover, or how directly overhead the satellite was when it took the picture. Check the examples, ask questions on Talk, and trust your instincts!

I am finding it disturbing to participate in this project, and I need support.
Even though we generally work with images of low enough resolution that you are unlikely to see extremely disturbing scenes, it can still be very difficult to see images of the aftermath of a disaster and know that there are people on the ground in distress.

If you need or want support, there are many options depending on where you are located in the world. Here is a list of international crisis support hotlines you can contact.

It is ok to stop participating and seek support if you are finding things difficult; please always prioritise your own well-being.

I need to get in touch with the project team. Who do I contact?
The PRN's principal investigator is Dr Brooke Simmons at Lancaster University; you can contact her directly on Talk and her full contact information is here, on Lancaster's website.

The PI's Head of Department may also be contacted; details are also on the Lancaster website.

This project has attained formal ethics approval in 2020 to run Zooniverse Planetary Response Network projects including the '/// Hurricane Melissa 2025 response. Ethical approval was attained from Lancaster University.

Thanks for your help.