Mountain Hub Unveils ‘Data For Good’ Initiative For Advocacy, Research & Citizen Science In The Outdoors
Mountain Hub, a community-fueled information-sharing platform for the outdoors, unveils Data For Good, an initiative that enables the Mountain Hub community to affect positive change through the power of crowd-sourced community data. Data for Good gathers anonymized, publicly shared data to help wildlands conservation groups, avalanche centers, universities, and research scientists on a variety of initiatives, including public lands conservation, improvements to water flow prediction, climate change research, and enhancing our understanding of behavior in avalanche terrain.
Mountain Hub is a crowd-sourced information network for the outdoors that inspires people to discover, experience and share their adventures. Mountain Hub’s mission is to inspire safe, responsible adventure and connect the outdoor community. The Mountain Hub team believes collective wisdom can enhance everyone’s outdoor pursuits, and is fortunate to partner with some of the top brands in the outdoor industry, such as Backcountry.com & Black Diamond, to enable the app to remain free for everyone. Mountain Hub was founded by a passionate group of outdoor enthusiasts from MIT, who packed their bags and headed west to pursue their dream in 2015.
“At its core, Mountain Hub has always been about enabling good for the outdoor community,” says Brint Markle, co-founder and CEO of Mountain Hub. “Through the Data for Good initiative, Mountain Hub users not only contribute to the safety and knowledge of fellow mountain travelers, but also to the protection and care of the playgrounds where they recreate.”
Partner organizations of the Data for Good initiative include the Outdoor Alliance, Winter Wildlands Alliance, Montana State University Snow & Avalanche Lab, Leave No Trace, Protect Our Winters and the NASA-funded Community Snow Observation project. Mountain Hub expects to expand its Data for Good partners significantly in 2018.
"We are extremely excited to team up with Mountain Hub,” says Erik Murdock, Outdoor Alliance Global Information Systems lab director. “More high-quality data from our community results in better analyses, and better analyses result in a better future for human-powered recreation on our public lands."
Mountain Hub snowpack observations and trip reports also directly support avalanche centers around the world, helping to gather valuable, map-based, real-time information. Through social sharing features, Mountain Hub community members can share reports directly to any avalanche center. Some organizations, such as the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, have directly integrated with Mountain Hub.
Mountain Hub crowd-sourced data also help numerous trail organizations and national parks, such as Grand Teton National Park, identify locations of down trees, washouts or other trail maintenance issues. During the Summer of 2017, Grand Teton National Park, used Mountain Hub to alert users of climbing conditions and recommended equipment on the Grand Teton.
Finally, this week Mountain Hub releases a host of new features that strengthen the community-oriented nature of the mobile application. Mountain Hub users can now comment and like others’ trip and observation reports as well as re-share directly to social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or via text or email.
