Launch of New Citizen Science Picture Pile Campaign on Livestock and Grassland Management

Background

Since 2022, IIASA has been leading the Horizon Europe funded LAMASUS project (Land Management for Sustainability). This project brings together 17 partners from 8 European countries, all working towards a shared goal: developing a new governance model to improve land use practices across Europe. One key result will be an open-access modeling toolbox, designed to help policymakers evaluate the economic and environmental benefits of different policies.

One of the main outputs of the project is a high-resolution geodatabase on land use management, which will be used to determine the environmental and socio-economic impacts of land use policies in the European Union. The development of the geodatabase has been led by the NODES research group at IIASA in collaboration with colleagues in the BNR program, which leads the LAMASUS project. More information about the geodatabase can be found here.

Why and how to contribute?

One of the key challenges with the geodatabase is that it needs validation. We have thousands of images of European landscapes that require classification by citizen scientists and volunteers. Your contributions will play a key role in helping us to validate the geodatabase and provide valuable insights into how grasslands are being utilized across Europe.

Using Picture Pile is easy. You can access it through a browser or download the app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Preliminary Results from the Livestock and Grassland Management Piles

As of November 2025, the Picture Pile campaign has involved 65 participants in classifying 26,128 unique locations in the livestock pile (to detect the presence of different types of livestock) and 59 participants in classifying 10,127 unique locations in the grassland management pile (to differentiate between grassland that is grazed or mowed). The photographs were classified multiple times so that we could determine the majority or consensus between volunteers. 

The figure below shows the livestock points on the left, where the majority consensus is high since livestock is much easier to classify while grazing and mowing, in contrast, is much harder to see in the photographs, explaining why the number of photos without a majority consensus is much higher (map on the right). 

Not all the photographs are classified yet, which is why you can see certain areas that have more densely collected information.  

If you are interested you can download Picture Pile on your mobile phone and help us continue to classify livestock and grassland management. In the future, we plan to compare our results with what AI models can do and present the outcomes. 

Each classification you make is a step toward a more accurate, high-quality geodatabase, and, on a larger scale, it heps to support more sustainable land use policies across Europe. We hope you're enjoying the campaign. Keep swiping, stay tuned for more updates, and remember — you can join at any time!