When I think of services that contribute to the betterment of mankind and help solve worldwide issues, Instagram is probably the last thing that I’d think of. However, the service can apparently do much more than fuel people’s vanity and make idiots feel like they’re photographers, it can also be used to track climate change, albeit indirectly.
In Los Angeles, the transition from spring to summer is heralded by the blooming of jacarandas, a photogenic tree that explodes in bright lavender fireworks and sprinkles flowers across the city like purple rain. But as I Instagrammed my sneakers against the rubbery petals the other week, I had a nagging feeling—this was way too early for jacarandas to be blooming. Instagram is a funny thing. Besides its skills for swiftly distributing an annoyingly large number of photos of my newborn child to the world, it serves as a very good tool for tracking the physical world around me. Among the well-annotated visual timeline of my activities since 2012, I have hundreds of photos of LA’s urban nature, most of them geotagged to specific places in the city. It’s social media’s ability to so easily capture and share these observations that inspired a new citizen science project, using tools like Instagram and Twitter to document evidence of climate change.