Geo-Wiki & Citizen Science

Accurate global land cover information is required as inputs to a number of global integrated assessment models like GLOBIOM. Using the crowd to improve this information will impact upon the policy decisions  ultimately made using such models.

For instance, the biofuel lobby is already using land availability figures produced by Cai et al. (2011). The validation of land availability for biofuels crowdsourced in GLOBIOM resulted in a 50% reduction in the estimates of land availability made by Cai et al. (2011). The validation work was thus crucial for downgrading the estimates used and also for highlighting the uncertainties inherent in these types of studies.

Human impact on land, interpolated from pixels interpreted by the crowd using Google Earth.

Geo-Wiki participants around the world validate land cover pixel by pixel for the Geo-Wiki coordinators at IIASA

To encourage more crowd participation, a number of competitions were set up in 2012 around different research questions. Prizes included co-authorship on a scientific paper resulting from the data. Examples of competitions in 2012 include:

1. Validation of a map of land availability for biofuels: maps of land availability for biofuels were produced by Cai et al. (2011). These maps were sampled, and a targeted campaign was set up to gather data on land cover and human impact at these sample locations. This branch of Geo-Wiki can be found at humanimpact.geo-wiki.org. For competition details see Perger et al. (2012).
2. Areas of disagreement between global land cover maps: this campaign targeted the areas of greatest disagreement between existing global land cover products in order to build a hybrid land cover product in the future. Progress was made on developing an algorithm for the creation of the hybrid map within the Landspotting project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).
3. Creation of a crowdsourced wilderness map: Using the validation sample from the Chinese high-resolution 30m land cover map provided through our ongoing collaborations with Prof. Peng Gong at Tsinghua University, these points were provided to the crowd for validation in terms of land cover and human impact. Human impact is a proxy for the degree of wilderness and has been used to produce a wilderness map.

Last edited: 07 November 2013