Methodology
How Aetheris turns raw signals into the indices you see across the platform — and, just as important, which layers are measured and which are still modeled.
Air quality
City-level AQI follows the US EPA 0–500 scale, derived from PM2.5, PM10 and NO₂ concentrations. Live readings come from the Open-Meteo Air Quality API (CAMS global model) and are merged over the model baseline on each visit; NO₂ is converted from µg/m³ to ppb for display.
Independence
Aetheris is an independent student project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated in partnership with Kazhydromet or any government agency unless explicitly stated. Agencies, operators and monitoring services named anywhere on this site — including in community field reports — are named as subjects of public environmental data, not as partners, sources of endorsement, or reviewers of anything published here.
Water, biodiversity & industry
Water Quality (WQI) and Industrial Load (IEI) are modeled from a deterministic regional baseline — no free real-time point feed exists for those layers yet, so treat them as indicative, not measured. Biodiversity is now split: the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) shown on the map and city pages is still that same modeled baseline, while a separate species-occurrence signal is live from GBIF — distinct species and occurrence records published within 50 km of each city over the last 10 years. The live signal reflects recording effort as well as ecology and does not feed into BII; the two are displayed side by side and badged separately. Industrial Load has a candidate live source that is not yet integrated: Copernicus Sentinel-5P / TROPOMI column densities for NO₂ and SO₂, which track industrial emission plumes. Adopting it means processing satellite scenes — through Google Earth Engine or equivalent — rather than the single REST call the air-quality and GBIF feeds need, so IEI stays modeled for now. For Water Quality no free real-time source covering Kazakhstan at this granularity has been identified at all. Alongside that gap sits the one signal here that is neither instrument nor model: community field reports, aggregated per city by category and severity over a rolling 30-day window and badged “Live · community”. It is real and current but self-reported, unverified against any instrument, and shaped by who happens to be looking — a city with no reports is a city nobody has reported from, not a clean one. It sits beside the modeled WQI and never feeds into it. Reports carry one of five statuses, described in full under “Community report statuses” below.
Community report statuses
A field report moves through a fixed vocabulary of five, and what is missing from it is deliberate. ① “Отправлен” (Submitted) is the default and everything a submission ever claims about itself: filed and stored, read by nobody. ② “AI-контекст добавлен” (AI context attached) means Aetheris Analyst put a live reading beside it — the nearest Open-Meteo/CAMS air-quality station for air and industrial reports, or the GBIF occurrence record for biodiversity ones. That context is computed in the browser at page load from the same feeds the city pages use, so it is never stored and no client can write the platform's own framing into the database; it is also a reading from now rather than from when the report was filed, which the bubble says on its face. There is no satellite cross-check of photographs and no placeholder pretending there is: that would need commercial imagery archives at a resolution and revisit rate this project has no access to. ③ “Corroborated сообществом” (Corroborated by the community) is the existing rule — two or more different devices reporting the same category in the same city within 72 hours. That is corroboration between people, not verification: two reporters can be wrong together, and no instrument has checked either. ④ “Передано в акимат/эко-инспекцию” (Forwarded) records that data was handed to a public body, with who sent it, when and where kept in a publicly readable log; it is an event in the report's history, not an assessment of it, and it says nothing about how or whether the recipient responded. ⑤ “Ответ организации” (Organisation response) appears only when an organisation that has agreed to appear on this platform leaves a comment, quoted as sent and attributed by name. ④ and ⑤ can only be set by a team member holding the service key — the database functions behind them have execute revoked from anonymous visitors, so nobody can mark their own report as forwarded to a government body or invent a reply from one. There is no “verified” status and no “resolved” status. Aetheris has no moderators, no instrument check standing behind a field report and no legal responsibility for verification, so it does not print a word that claims any of the three.
Composite risk
The Environmental Risk Index (ERI) blends the layer indices with regional climate-risk weightings into a single 0–100 score per city.
Validation
Cross-checks between modeled values, live readings and community field reports are being formalised. This section will document the validation protocol and known error bounds. What exists today is narrower and should not be mistaken for it: a live reading placed beside a report as context (status ②), and corroboration between independent reporters (status ③). Neither is a validation step.
Eco-Points, ranks and badges
Contributors accumulate Eco-Points: 10 for filing a report, 25 when it reaches “Corroborated сообществом”, 5 when the attached photo clears a resolution and sharpness check, and 15 for a follow-up update on one of your own earlier reports. Points are called Eco-Points and nothing else — they are not tokens, cannot be transferred or redeemed, carry no monetary value, and gate nothing on the platform. Because Aetheris has no accounts, they are computed in the visitor's own browser from that browser's own reports and are cleared with site data; one person on two devices counts as two contributors, and the inputs a client writes (the photo-quality flag, the follow-up link) are self-declared. The rank ladder extends the names already used here — Newcomer (written «Новичок» in the concept), Observer I–III, Field Researcher, Eco-Inspector, Sentinel I–III, Constellation — and the five geographic badges cover Almaty, the Aral basin, the Temirtau–Karaganda industrial belt, the Balkhash basin and the Caspian shore.
Events and check-in
Anyone can create a community event and RSVP to one, capped at three new events per device per day. Check-in is the only thing on the platform that asserts someone was physically in a place, so its rules are enforced in the database rather than in the browser: within 500 m of the event's pin, and from an hour before the start until four hours after it. Coordinates still come from the visitor's own device, so this stops the accidental and the casual case, not a deliberate forgery. Two known limits, stated rather than hidden: participant caps are checked before the write rather than locked, so two people can take the last place at once; and because an anonymous device id cannot be proved, an RSVP can be withdrawn by anyone who knows it. Both close when the platform has real accounts. No report data is reachable either way.