NightUp Castelldefels – About the project

WHy NightUp?

All aspects of artificial light (intensity, color, direction of light, hours when the light is kept on, …) play their own role in the impact that light pollution can have. Therefore, detailed information on each of these aspects is needed to understand the role played by each of the parameters and have a complete and clear vision of the effects that artificial light can have on the environment and our health.

Currently, scientists have maps with information about the intensity of artificial light that allow them to make environmental impact studies in various areas of the planet. These data are obtained through images of the Earth made from satellites in space. The problem is that the devices that make these images can only obtain information about the light intensity, without any indication about its color.

However, in recent years it has been shown that the impact of light is different depending on the color. In general, it seems that lights with more blue components tend to have more negative effects than those that are more yellow or reddish. Therefore, scientists need a tool to investigate the relationship between the color of light and the different effects of light pollution.

The aim of NightUp is to help scientists generate a map of the color of artificial light in order to draw conclusions about the effects of the color of artificial light on living beings and ecosystems. Citizen participation is essential to obtain local and detailed information, which would be very complicated (and expensive) to obtain otherwise. With NightUp, people could actively participate in a scientific experiment, contributing to progress in the search for solutions to a global problem, such as light pollution.

citizen science

To participate in NightUp, people had to take pictures of the various artificial light elements found in the streets of Castelldefels through the web application of the project. All images were analyzed later, with the aim of generating a map of the color of the artificial light of Castelldefels. In this way, people like you helped scientists and experts in light pollution while discovering the night of Castelldefels from another perspective. Citizen participation is absolutely essential for this project to work. The more photos and participants, the better!

FROM CASTELLDEFELS TO THE WHOLE WORLD

To participate in NightUp, you need a single measuring instrument: the smartphone camera. This is an unusual thing in a scientific experiment and is an important challenge for the project. To obtain valid and reliable results, scientists normally use well-calibrated instruments designed for that purpose under controlled conditions. In NightUp we extract information from photos taken with different instruments and that have not been designed for scientific research: the cameras of our phones. Being able to compare the information obtained with so many different instruments is essential, so that the data collected with NightUp have scientific validity to create a coherent map of light pollution and can be used for further research.

We designed an algorithm to extract the colour of the lamp from the photos collected through the NightUp app. In order to validate our method, we compared the colors obtained with the ones of the lamps registered in the database of public streetlights provided by the city council of Castelldefels: the results show that it is possible to distinguish accurately warm from cold lights by using uncalibrated instruments.

We also showed that our results add information to the the ones obtained from a more traditional method, a photo of the Barcelona area taken from the International Space Station (ISS) with a calibrated digital camera. While the ISS photo covers a large area with just one click, the NightUp approach can reach higher spatial resolution and lamps that are not accessible to satellites (like the ones below the canopies of trees).

The published study shows that the NightUp approach is scalable to larger areas and that it retrieves useful high-quality data for scientists working on the study of light pollution, as well as for local governments to optimize outdoor lighting and address light pollution effectively.