FOCO-VID| A New Perspective

A New Perspective

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protected areas and other forms of wilderness areas (e.g., arboretums, beaches, parks, marine monuments) have been closed worldwide. Your challenge is to lead the effort to examine any potential impacts of reduced human traffic in such local protected natural environments.

BASELINE AND MONITORING OF ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES IN THE COLOMBIAN CARIBBEAN AND ITS INSULAR ZONE.

Summary

Establishing a monitoring proposal, which allows observing local changes of the environmental variables, including air quality, water quality, etc during the quarantine stage to create a database of a comparative baseline with the results obtained from subsequent monitoring, as tourism activities return. The final product of this project consists of a website that works like an open database called An Eye ON The Beach that allows the integration of the whole variables previously mentioned in the Colombian Caribbean beaches and its insular zone for decision making

How We Addressed This Challenge

Environmental quality indicators of touristic beaches are the basis for determining sustainability conditions required for its conservation. Continuous investigation of the pollution control is limited in Colombia, either for data quality or for limited access public has, added to the lack of articulation between entities of environment conservation. This project pretends to integer the satellite data of NASA, CNES, CSA, which are required for the measurement of established variables in ICAPTU, so that it can be possible to have continuous monitoring and analyzing more precise from a primary quality source of information and with a higher resolution in any fortuitous period.

How We Developed This Project

Our objective is to develop a project through the information available in Nasa platforms, related with environmental variables like Aerosol Optical Depth, Aerosol Albedo, Carbon Dioxide, Dust, Methane, Particulate Matter, Sulfur dioxide, Nitrous Oxide and others which will be used to quantify the changes that have happened in the proposed location. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that this information doesn't have enough detail level and resolution, so it is difficult to make a thorough analysis about the potential impact of human traffic, that is why is additionally proposed, take into account national sources information that's usually confident, like IDEAM, INVEMAR, CORALINA and others. Besides, to improve the data quality, it is proposed to increase the satellite detail, because it will allow to perform a detailed analysis in the area and to get the variables mentioned in a higher scale. Furthermore, it is pretended to develop a website that allows the visualization of the data with their respective indicators, likewise, the coastal population will have the opportunity of improving the database of the sighting of species by reporting in the website, encouraging the appropriation of information and the generation of initiatives by the population to increase tourism sustainability on their beaches.