A few days ago, Safecast reached a major milestone when our radiation measurement database reached 200 million data points. This database contains both mobile data collected using bGeigies and realtime data collected by our fixed systems. Our database has continued to grow so steadily over the past several years that, to be honest, we haven’t always celebrated these milestones. We hit 100 million datapoints in mid-2018, and 150 million in mid-2020, even as the impact of the pandemic was being felt strongly around the world. Looking at the graph of the dataset’s growth, we can see that collection slowed during the pandemic, but remained at about 20 million datapoints per year. In 2022, however, it returned to the pre-pandemic high of roughly 25 million datapoints. When we consider that it took Safecast roughly three and a half years to accumulate our first 25 million datapoints, the current growth rate is nice to see.
The growth of the dataset is not the only way to gauge the progress of the Safecast project, but it’s a fairly vivid metric. To be honest, we were concerned that during the pandemic our volunteers wouldn’t have time or energy to contribute much monitoring data. But while the drop-off between 2020-2022 is noticeable, the data shows that our community remained very active during those years of isolation and little travel. We feel that the fact that data collection remained high during those years is a testament mainly to the energy and determination of our volunteers. It’s also a testament to the design of our data collection system, which has proven capable of continuing to operate at a high level of activity even during long periods when much other activity was sharply decreased or shut down. We designed the system to be as autonomous as possible, and our teams have always been organized primarily online. We’re happy to see proof that this has worked well. More than that, we thank everyone who participates in our global volunteer network.
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