The Citizens4Copernicus (C4C) project consortium held its first annual meeting in Vienna, where partners reviewed key achievements, including the development of methods for tree attribute extraction and the creation of a prototype app for citizen science data collection. The project is now entering the data collection phase, focusing on forest and tree mapping through citizen science campaigns, while planning additional measurement campaigns and further app enhancements.
The Citizens4Copernicus (C4C) project consortium (IIASA, TU Vienna, Tree.ly, BFW, Bundesforste, Umweltbundesamt and ÖAW) had its first annual meeting at the Austrian Research Centre for Forest (BFW) in Vienna on November, 12. 2024.The meeting started with a series of presentations from each project partner about the project status, achievements, and future work, concluding with feedback from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency project officer, Thomas Geist. It was noted that the milestones and deliverables from the first project year were achieved, including (a) the establishment of methods for tree attribute extraction from 3D data and (b) the development of the prototype app for Citizen-Science (CS) data collection from single trees and forest plots, the Tree-Quest and Forest Quest modules, respectively within the Geo-Quest app
Furthermore, the infrastructure for storing and presenting tree and forest data collected by Geo-Quest has been established and exposed to the app users on this webpage.
With those outputs, the C4C project is now moving into the data collection phase in the next years, where the focus will be more on user segments through different citizen science campaigns and the development of the CS-based use cases: (a) forest biomass mapping, (b) tree species mapping, (c) urban tree mapping.
In the second part of the meeting, we had a measurement session where we collected valuable feedback from the project partners about the mobile app. Finally, the meeting concluded with a discussion session where we brainstormed and decided on our measurement campaigns for the next year. We are happy to report that the Austrian Research Promotion Agency has approved the project interim report, and we would like to thank our project officer and all project partners for their valuable and constructive feedback and contribution!
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