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When evacuees become separated from their pets while fleeing hurricanes, wildfires or other natural disasters, they’re often difficult to reunite.

Computer scientists at the University of babyֱ��app Boulder hope to change that with a new online tool designed to leverage the work of crowds to reconnect pets with their human families.

The EmergencyPetMatcher website, which recently received its final approvals, is ready to be deployed during the next disaster. The tool lets anyone go online and create reports of lost and found pets as well as propose matches between the pictures of lost pets and found ones. Those suggested matches can be voted up or down by website users. When a match gets enough up votes, an email is sent to the people who posted both photos, recommending they contact each other.

Reuniting people with their pets can help them endure the psychological strain caused by a natural disaster, said Joanne White, a doctoral student at CU-Boulder’s Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) who has been part of the team developing the tool.

“Those most impacted by loss of pets and service animals are also society’s most vulnerable—children, the elderly and the disabled,” White said. “Minimizing the time these people are separated from their animals is an important way to help recovery after a disaster.”  

Even so, keeping pets and owners together has not always been a priority. During Hurricane Katrina, 70,000 pets were displaced from their owners and only 3 percent were reunited. In the wake of the storm, new legislation—called the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) act—passed that requires states wanting access to federal emergency disaster funds to accommodate pets in their evacuation plans.

While the law is designed to keep pets and their owners together, it does not address pets if they become displaced.

The new EmergencyPetMatcher tool hopes to help fill that hole. Already, pet owners are using the Internet in natural disasters to find information about displaced animals. During Hurricane Sandy, for example, lost and found pets were posted on Facebook and Craigslist, White said.

EmergencyPetMatcher is a one-stop website where this information can be aggregated. It also will offer a way for people not directly impacted by the disaster to help.

“It’s designed so people of all ages can be directly involved in the needs of people affected,” White said. “After a disaster, people really want to help. It doesn’t matter how old or how young you are or your physical ability, this tool lets you do something worthwhile for people and animals who were directly affected.”

The deployment of EmergencyPetMatcher is being led by doctoral student Mario Barrenechea. White, Barrenechea and graduate student Joshua Barron’s original design of the website was a top-four finalist among more than 60 entries in the Student Design Competition at the 2012 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

EmergencyPetMatcher is part of a larger effort within Project EPIC (Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis)—an initiative to leverage social media during disasters that is based in CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science—to address challenges associated with animals during disasters.

White also is working on a tool to digitally check in animals that are taken to evacuation centers, often fairgrounds, during disasters. The goal is to make it easier to keep track of animals and their care, and to have instant access to the number and kind of animals being sheltered at any given center.

White also recently initiated and led two teams of senior engineering students at CU-Boulder to design maps for two babyֱ��app counties for use in animal evacuations. The new maps show the public where animals should be taken and the best way to maneuver the trailers used to transport large animals to and from the sites.

The EmergencyPetMatcher site is not currently live. During a disaster, CU-Boulder will release the website address to people in the affected area.