Harnessing Social Media for Environmental Sustainability: A Measurement Study on Harmful Algal Blooms

In recent years, social media has revolutionized citizen science activities. Given its popularity among people and communities, these social media services could be used effectively for environmental surveillance. However in social media, people use different terms to refer to same event for example, Blue Green Algae, Cyan bacteria, Algae Bloom and Red Tide refer to same event but one is very technical and other is more generic term. The technical terms are normally known to field experts or the domain scientists which inherently would mean more reliable information on social media but the more generic term is used by people of various backgrounds putting a question on the trustworthiness of the post. Moreover, the user base and the number of posts for more technical terms are relatively less compared to the generic terms. But the dichotomy is that the more common the term, the more noisy the data. One can say using generic terms to track the environmental events would be more effective. But the social media data has lot of flux thus using train once and classify ever model of machine learning will miss to classify many of the relevant events as shown in the paper. Our research seeks to explore the various opportunities, challenges and approaches in using social media for environmental monitoring.