Citizen Scientists Are Helping With Rescue Efforts In Hurricane Melissa's Aftermath – Here's How You Can Too
By Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
November 7, 2025
Introduction:
(IFL Science) Hurricane Melissa was a catastrophic event. It was the third-most intense Atlantic Hurricane on record and the strongest of 2025. It was the strongest ever to make landfall in Jamaica, where it hit the Caribbean island on October 28, 2025. This cyclone has caused the death of over 83 people in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and left billions of dollars of damage in its wake.
"Initial estimates show that the damage caused is approximately the equivalent of 30% of Jamaica's GDP, a figure that's expected to rise," Kishan Khoday, UN Development Program resident representative for the Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, said Thursday.
The complete picture of damages remains uncertain, especially to public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, ports, and airports. The lack of knowledge is a hindrance to the timely distribution of aid, and for that reason, the Logistics Cluster at the World Food Programme asked researchers to involve citizen scientists in helping out.
Using the Zooniverse citizen science platform, any member of the general public can help by looking at satellite images and identifying road blockages, damaged bridges, and more. Each image is classified multiple times by the current 2,277 registered volunteers, but the team is looking for more people to get involved.
“No prior experience is needed, and we really value all of our volunteers, and couldn't do this without them. We ask multiple people to look at each image so that we can gain a consensus, and we use this to generate heat maps that we can give to relief workers on the ground,” Dr Izzy Garland, a team member of this project, told IFLScience.
Read more here:
https://www.iflscience.com/citizen-sci ... too-81490
To view the Zooniverse citizen science platform:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/al ... issa-2025
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill
