Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing for Earth Observations: An Analysis of Stakeholder Opinions on the Present and Future

Abstract

Abstract:The impact of Crowdsourcing and citizen science activities on academia, businesses, governance and society has been enormous. This is more prevalent today with citizens and communities collaborating with organizations, businesses and authorities to contribute in a variety of manners, starting from mere data providers to being key stakeholders in various decision-making processes. The "Crowdsourcing for observations from Satellites" project is a recently concluded study supported by demonstration projects funded by European Space Agency (ESA). The objective of the project was to investigate the different facets of how crowdsourcing and citizen science impact upon the validation, use and enhancement of Observations from Satellites (OS) products and services. This paper presents our findings in a stakeholder analysis activity involving participants who are experts in crowdsourcing, citizen science for Earth Observations. The activity identified three critical areas that needs attention by the community as well as provides suggestions to potentially help in addressing some of the challenges identified.

Crowdsourcing to Enhance Insights from Satellite Observations

“…These two topics are critical to the sustained success of an initiative both in terms of maintaining the amount of data collected or processed over time as well as the value of the final crowdsourced information. Based on the findings from the demonstration projects and stakeholder analysis [24] of their understanding of how the field will evolve in the next few years, a set of recommendations are proposed:…”

Framework for Enabling Technical and Organizational Interoperability in the Management of Environmental Crises and Disasters

“…Since the world today awaits more disasters related to climate changes (e.g., floods, droughts, landslides, air pollution), it is important to provide necessary tools for not only treating the crises when they occur, but also for monitoring the events leading to a disastrous situations. Moreover, such solutions need to have the strength of being easily implementable, adjustable to all the needs of different end-users (e.g., crisis responder, police, volunteer [13]), adjustable to new research and technological approaches (e.g., citizen science [14], crowdtasking [15]), and potentially globally affordable and available. It is expected that the profiling approach of the C2-SENSE Framework, with its provided software components in combination with the set of rules orchestrating the functionalities of those components and rules for achieving interoperability, is a solution fulfilling those needs.…”

The Role of Stakeholders in Creating Societal Value From Coastal and Ocean Observations

“…Similarly, there is a large and dynamic network of observation technologies, and institutions and agencies that also benefit from, and drive, advances and disruptions. Examples of disruptive technological advances in the field of ocean observation and more widely include NOAA's Big Data Project 2 ; EO Data Cubes and Analysis Ready Datasets (Giuliani et al, 2017;Nativi et al, 2017), crowd-sourcing and citizen science (Mazumdar et al, 2017;Brovelli et al, 2018;O'Sullivan et al, 2018) and deep learning and artificial intelligence (Lary et al, 2018). Related to this is the way that Big Data has changed the paradigm when it comes to the availability and exploitation of ocean observing data.…”