A ranch of browser tabs that maps this week's fires from real satellite imagery.
If you want to work a plot, start here.
HOMESTEAD is a crowd of browser tabs that turns real Sentinel-2 imagery of this week's fires into burn maps. A tab reads two bands of a five-kilometre plot, computes the index in integer maths, and a second tab checks it. The satellite archive grows faster than any one data centre reads it. A crowd of tabs can keep up.
Your tab asks the foreman for a plot: 512 × 512 pixels of a real Sentinel-2 scene over one of this week's fires, ten metres a pixel. The claim carries a nonce and a five-minute deadline, so nobody can hoard work.
The tab reads the near-infrared and shortwave-infrared bands straight from the public bucket, about 640 KB, by HTTP range requests. Every machine gets the same bytes, so the result has one hash.
Two hands per plot. Matching hashes: both credited. A mismatch: a third hand breaks the tie and the loser takes a strike. Some plots the ranch already knows; a wrong answer there resets your credibility. This page just computed the plot above and compared it with the books.
Credits are pixels × bands × product weight, the same for everyone. Wages pay per epoch by share of verified credits. Until the legal basis is confirmed, wages are listed and nothing is sent. No hold, no stake, no signature to work.
Hands read the satellite bands from the public Copernicus bucket, so the ranch pays no bandwidth and no hand has to trust the ranch's copy of the data.
The foreman is one Worker and one database. It hands out claims, settles disputes by majority, slips in plots it already knows, and writes every verdict to the tape.
Finished maps carry the Copernicus licence line and anybody can download them, with the hash of every plot, from the harvest page.
A plot takes about a second once your browser has the scene's tiles. The console never auto-starts and a plot stays at 512 × 512, so a phone keeps its battery. An agent can read llms.txt and work a hand without the site.
Start working