Advances in the design and implementation of crowdsourcing program and in the vulnerability assessment. Study case: urban flooding in Villa Páez, Córdoba, Argentina

Abstract

This project presents a distributed open collaboration scheme whose main objective is to carry out a diagnosis of the flooding problem that periodically affects the Villa Paez neighborhood in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, through joint work between researchers of the National University of Cordoba, the Villa Paez Neighborhood Center and the citizens living in the neighborhood. Three citizen science projects converge in this scheme. On the one hand, “Cazadores de Crecidas” whose objective is the characterization of surface runoff from videos and photographs taken by neighbors previously trained for this purpose. On the other hand, "Adopto un Cuerpo de Agua como Mi Mascota" is a project where we work identifying with the community the basin from where the runoff flows and building a shared knowledge base. And finally, “Proyecto MATTEO”, which consists of installing low-cost weather stations and rain gauges in schools and organizations to record data on precipitation events. In this way, citizens are direct and fundamental participants in this study, generating contributions from their experience and form the records of extremely valuable data, which would be difficult for the academic and research participants to obtain on their own. Finally, this paper presents a quantification of the vulnerability of the study area to urban flooding, emphasizing the analysis of the physical and social dimensions.