Environmental activism? There are apps for that

For Indonesia, forest conservation and efforts to mitigate and prevent land and forest fires has been a big focus area in the digital space. The severity of annual blazes, which managed to raze 1.65 million hectares of land last year, has pushed environmental groups and government agencies to develop digital tools to help mitigate the disaster.

Here are a few examples of apps that look to bridge the digital divide in conservation efforts:

Urundata is a crowdsourcing app that invites its users to help interpret landscape and environmental data for research and environmental restoration purposes.

The app, launched in April last year, boasts over 1,000 downloads on Google Play Store, with 1,055 data contributors in 19 campaigns helping to observe 4,408,458 landscape spots.

The app is a project of the RESTORE+ consortium, which consists of the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Indonesia, International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASS), as well as 10 higher learning institutions in South Sumatra.