Harnessing the power of volunteers, the internet and Google Earth to collect and validate global spatial information using Geo-Wiki

Abstract

Highlights of the Paper 1. Geo-Wiki is a tool for visualisation, crowdsourcing and validation of information on global land cover.2. Recent enhancements to the tool include a Geo-Wiki for teaching, mobile phone apps and gamfication.3. Crowdsourced data from Geo-Wiki have been used to create new maps of agricultural field size, wilderness, cropland and land cover. AbstractInformation about land cover and land use is needed for a wide range of applications such as nature protection and biodiversity, forest and water management, urban and transport planning, natural hazard prevention and mitigation, monitoring of agricultural policies and economic land use modelling. A number of different remotely-sensed global land cover products are available but studies have shown that there are large spatial discrepancies between these different products when compared. To address this issue of land cover uncertainty, a tool called Geo-Wiki was developed, which integrates online and mobile applications, high resolution satellite imagery available from Google Earth, and data collection through crowdsourcing as a mechanism for validating and improving globally relevant spatial information on land cover and land use. Through its growing network of volunteers and a number of successful data collection campaigns, almost 5 million samples of land cover and land use have been collected at many locations around the globe. This paper provides an overview of the main features of Geo-Wiki, and then using a series of examples, illustrates how the crowdsourced data collected through Geo-Wiki have been used to improve information on land cover and land use.

Crowdsourcing for agricultural applications: A review of uses and opportunities for a farmsourcing approach

“…Numerous scientific projects using crowdsourcing are based on this 177 approach, such as human interpretation of galaxy images (Raddick et al, 2010), mathematical 178 problem solving (Cranshaw & Kittur, 2011) and classification of land cover based on easily accessible 179 earth imagery (Fritz et al, 2012;See et al, 2015).…”

New Generation Platforms for Exploration of Crowdsourced Geo-Data

“…The main example is Geo-Wiki 23 (Fritz et al 2009;Fritz et al 2012), an online Google Earthbased crowdsourcing platform where volunteers exploit high-resolution imagery to perform spatial validation of existing LULC maps. A recent paper (See et al 2015) offers an overview of the main features of the platform together with examples on how the crowdsourced data collected through Geo-Wiki has been used to improve information on LULC. A similar system is VIEW-IT (Virtual Interpretation of Earth Web-Interface Tool), a crowdsourcing platform based on Google Earth, which allows users to collect LULC data from high-resolution imagery (Clark and Aide 2011).…”

Opening up Smart Cities: Citizen-Centric Challenges and Opportunities from GIScience

“…Martella et al [86] have produced a gamification framework for Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI [87]) which has three main parameters: the user, the tasks of the user (data gathering, data validation or data integration), and the types of datasets manipulated by the user. Along the same lines, [88] discussed a combination of social gaming, geospatial mobile tools and data collection campaigns to increase the network of volunteers to capture urban morphology for climate modeling purposes.…”