Research
WISEN on Zooniverse!
Mapping the Environmental Impacts of War Through Citizen Science
Armed conflicts can cause severe and lasting environmental harm, damaging industrial sites, energy infrastructure, agricultural systems, water resources, ecosystems, and impacting public health and livelihoods. Despite growing recognition of these impacts, there is still no single global system for documenting and analysing environmental harm during war.
The Wartime IncidentS to ENvironment Database (WISEN) was created to help address this gap. Developed by the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), WISEN combines satellite imagery, open-source investigation techniques, environmental risk analysis, and conflict research to document environmentally harmful incidents in armed conflicts.
Originally developed in response to the environmental damage caused by the war in Ukraine after February 2022, WISEN has since been tested and expanded to other conflict settings, including Sudan and Iran and the wider Middle East. Our long-term ambition is to build a global, publicly accessible system for understanding how wars affect the environment.
Why Citizen Science?
Environmental harm during conflicts is often difficult to document. Access to affected areas may be dangerous or impossible, reporting can be limited, and the scale of destruction can overwhelm researchers. At the same time, advances in satellite imagery and open-source tools now make it possible to remotely identify damage across large geographic areas.
Through this Zooniverse project, volunteers can help us identify visible damage to environmentally hazardous facilities using satellite imagery. These contributions support the first stage of WISEN’s assessment process and help expand the scale and speed at which environmental harm can be documented.
By participating, volunteers contribute to:
- Increasing global awareness of the environmental consequences of armed conflicts.
- Supporting future environmental assessment and recovery efforts.
- Contributing data that may assist researchers, humanitarian organisations and, journalists, and future accountability processes.
- Building a long-term global record of conflict-related environmental harm.
How WISEN Works
WISEN organises information into three levels of analysis:
Level 0 — Damage Identification
At Level 0, satellite imagery is used to determine whether a facility has been damaged. This is the focus of the Zooniverse project.
Volunteers review imagery to help identify visible signs of damage at facilities that may pose environmental risks if impacted by conflict. Once damage is confirmed, WISEN calculates a theoretical environmental harm score based on the type of facility and the vulnerability of the areas around it.
Level 0 data provides broad geographic coverage and is especially important in areas where on-the-ground reporting is limited or absent.
Level 1 — Incident Verification
At Level 1, researchers investigate incidents in more detail using social media footage, testimony, news reporting, and satellite imagery. Incidents are verified and assessed for their likely environmental significance.
Level 2 — Detailed Environmental Assessment
High-priority incidents move to Level 2, where researchers compile highly detailed evidence dossiers using satellite analysis, open-source investigations, and environmental research. These assessments help estimate the actual environmental harm caused.
A Global Research Effort
WISEN is designed to be flexible and adaptable across different conflicts, geographies, and forms of warfare. The framework has been developed to:
- Work across diverse conflict environments.
- Integrate with existing conflict and environmental datasets.
- Support safe and responsible data sharing.
- Evolve alongside new technologies and methods.
Join the Project!
By contributing to WISEN on Zooniverse, you are helping build one of the first global systems dedicated to tracking the environmental consequences of armed conflict.
Your participation supports collaborative research that aims to improve understanding, accountability, environmental protection, and post-conflict recovery worldwide.
Together, we can help make the environmental costs of war more visible.