Hello and welcome to the first edition of the Bellingcat Challenge Newsletter. It’s great to have you!

Each month, we’re going to use this newsletter to release a new set of challenges, give you the answers to the previous month’s challenges and highlight some of the interesting ways that members of the open source community solved them.

We also have a couple of cool extra features for April. 

April Challenge - Wild Lives

This month, we’re featuring a series of wildlife-themed challenges.

The series was created by Foeke Postma, who is a senior investigator on Bellingcat’s environment team. Foeke has worked on multiple wildlife trafficking investigations, including this recent piece that identified a secretive individual who was selling endangered species on social media. Foeke’s work is both creative and methodical. His previous Bellingcat articles (hint hint) might give you some useful clues to solve this month’s challenges.

You can find the new challenges here. 

Let us know how you get on and head to the #BellingcatChallenge channel on our Discord server if you’re keen to collaborate with others taking part.

And make sure to tune in to our Patreon channel on Wednesday, April 16 at 5 pm CET, where Bellingcat researcher Aiganysh Aidarbekova will try to solve this month’s challenges on a live stream.

March’s Multispectral Posers

First of all, SPOILER ALERT. From this point on we will be discussing the answers to last month’s challenges. If you haven’t done these challenges yet it might be best to stop reading here!

If you have done  the March challenges (and have likely learnt a lot about salt mines), let’s dive in. 

Using multispectral images can be key for all kinds of online investigations, but specifically those that focus on the environment. Multispectral images can reveal scenes invisible to the naked eye or that can be seen in optical satellite imagery, such as the presence and quality of water, vegetation, soil health and more.

Bellingcat recently produced this handy guide about multispectral imagery, which turned out to be useful homework.

Here are the answers to the Multispectral Imagery challenges:

1. The island image depicted the department of Mayotte

2. The ICAO code of the airport featured in the image was YBWP

3. The body of water depicted was Sambhar Salt Lake

4. The name of the topographic depression is Sua Pan

5. The highest peak detailed in the image is Mauna Loa

But how did people solve the challenges? Let’s take a look at some blogs, write-ups and tips shared online. 

Dam Coffee explained in this Medium post how they found the ‘Take You to the Beach’ photo by reverse image searching the picture on Google. They also shared an alternative approach where they searched Google for the term “archipelago with lagoon”. That led them to an article that showed a picture of what appeared to be the same location.

Dam Coffee also took on the second exercise, ‘Down by the Sea’, and used Bellingcat’s Multispectral Imagery Explorer to test different combinations to find a visual match of the band visible in the challenge image. 

The band setting used was ‘Bauxite Mining Band Ratio Comparison’, making it clear the area was heavily involved in bauxite mining. Dam Coffee then decided to look for locations of bauxite mines. Searching countries alphabetically, this report said there were six bauxite mines in Australia. By using Bellingcat’s Multi-Spectral Imagery Explorer over these six sites it became clear that a mine in Weipa, Queensland, provided a match! Given the challenge asked for the ICAO code of the airport visible in the picture, it was then a matter of checking the code.

For the same exercise, Dr Tristan Jenkinson of the Ediscovery Channel tried to use Geo Guesser — a specific GPT built by lexical.nz for ChatGPT (not the popular online game). The tool initially provided some very confident yet wrong answers. But after being given more clues, such as asking to check areas with active Bauxite mining operations, it finally honed in on the correct location. Check out the full discussion between Tristan and the Geo Guesser GPT here.

The Multispectral Imagery Tool was also used by One-Nine9, who wrote in their blog that the image for the third challenge, ‘Make the Water Turn Black’, depicted a SWIR band combination. This particular setting is attuned to highlight water and wet soil, with clear water appearing black and sediment-laden water appearing blue. One-Nine9 wrote that the pattern of blue, blocky plots reminded them of “salt pans / salt flats”. They described having to search a number of countries where there are salt flats to find an exact match, which turned out to be the Sambhar salt lake in India.

The next exercise, ‘Kind of Blue’, could also be solved by using the Multispectral Imagery Explorer and systematically examining known salt flats across continents to find an exact match at the Sua Pan, a natural topographic depression in the Makgadikgadi region of Botswana. However, due to the unique clarity and shape of the Sua Pan, One-Nine9 found the answer to this challenge by simply Googling “salt flats” and scanning the results to find one with matching features.  

The last challenge, ‘Dandelion’, was solved by Dam Coffee by using the ‘Mineral Zone Contrast Band Ratios’ on the Multispectral Image Explorer. This setting highlights different minerals and rock types. The color variations in the image could be explained by different minerals exposed by volcanic activity. Once this was established, Dam Coffee’s search was narrowed by focusing on regions with high tectonic activity and manually searching through them. They started out looking at islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean before honing in on Hawaii. Searching across Hawaii it soon became apparent that the image matched an area where the Mauna Lau volcano was the highest peak.

Voila!

If you would like a more in-depth and detailed explanation of how these puzzles were completed, you can watch Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins try to solve them in the below video which we aired on our Patreon channel last month.

Tips from Bellingcat’s Toolkit Team

We asked Sophie Tedling, a Bellingcat volunteer who works on our Toolkit Team, to highlight some useful multispectral imaging tools and resources.

Sophie described Google Earth Engine, a platform directed at environmental monitoring using satellite imagery and geospatial data, as the “Rolls Royce” of multispectral tools. You can learn more about how to use all the different bands and features of Google Earth Engine by checking out our toolkit entry here. Sophie also highlighted Copernicus Browser, which you can read more about here.

Other Shoutouts

We loved hearing how you sought to solve the open source challenges and encouraged others in your networks to do the same. Please tag us and let us know about any other cool blogposts, videos or contributions. 

Here is some of the work that people shared with us after the December challenges: 

• Daisy Hickman, an OSINT specialist who was featured in the British TV show Hunted, made a video walkthrough of one of our geolocation exercises 

• Yusuf Zafar Kazmi created a great Medium blogpost, detailing his approach to the December challenges

• Nathaniel Graham used his blog to share his findings from the challenge titled ‘Hot Stuff’. He was even able to prove we had made a mistake. Read his blog to find out how!

• Matthieu gave a detailed breakdown of how he solved several challenges here

• Manu E from the Epinards and Caramel blog detailed answers to all five challenges from the first week in December in this easy-to-follow post

• Shoutout to Meshal Osint and Eibe, who looked into our maritime challenges and posted about them on Medium. @Gudini1 also produced this very cool write up about our Urban Exploration challenges 

• Last but not least, GeoGuessr super-player Rainbolt posted a video in which he tried to solve a week’s worth of Bellingcat challenges in under 30 minutes. At time of writing, the video has had over 500,000 views. Watch how he got on here.

That’s it for the first Bellingcat Challenge newsletter. We hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know what you liked (and didn’t like) about this newsletter by leaving comments and suggestions on our Discord. 

Share with your friends so they can be notified when the latest Bellingcat Challenge drops every month. If you have been forwarded this email and would like to sign up, please do so here.

Elsewhere on Bellingcat

Before we go, here’s some links to the other cool things Bellingcat has been working on:

• Satellite Images Shows Schools and Hospitals Destroyed in Northern Gaza

• Nowhere to Run: The Online Footprint of a Kinahan Cartel Associate

• Don’t Get Scammed: Tips for Spotting AI Generated Fake Products

See you next month!