Amditis, A.

Fritz, S.

Hemment, D.

Moorthy, I.

Tsertou, A.

Wehn, U.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

The Next Generation of Citizen ObservatoriesDrew Hemment1, Angelos Amditis2, Steffen Fritz3, Uta Wehn4, Inian Moorthy3, Athanasia Tsertou21 University of Dundee, 2 Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), 3 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 4 UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water EducationTHE GROW OBSERVATORYCollective intelligence and participatory citizen science for growing for food and sustainable land useThe SCENT smart toolbox consists of a crowdsourcing platform which will be used to collectimages and text from citizens. This will extend the in-situ infrastructure to support thecalibration and validation of satellite-based remote sensing imagery. Coupled with this platformis the SCENT intelligence engine which will utilize innovative machine learning to classify &annotate images and text sourced from citizens and existing open platforms. In addition, aserious gaming application will be developed to annotate unutilised images from suchplatforms (e.g. Flickr, Panoramio), as complementary data sources to quantify the impact ofland-cover and land-use changes in the context of flood risk prediction. The project will testand validate the SCENT toolbox in two large scale pilots, the urban case of Kifisos river inAttica, Greece and the rural case of Danube Delta in Romania. The anticipated people-centricobservation web will be OGC-compliant and serve as a valuable resource to GEOSS portal.SCENTSmart Toolbox for Engaging Citizens into a People-Centric Observation WebCitizen observatories can help improve data collection, cooperative planning andenvironmental stewardship of stakeholders who can jointly take care of the environmentalsystem addressing complex, cross-cutting problems. Ground Truth 2.0 aims to strengthen thefull feedback-loop in the information chain from citizen-based data collection to knowledgesharing for joint decision-making, cooperative planning and environmental management. Withan emphasis on social dimensions (i.e. issue-driven citizen observatories, incentivizationstrategies) the project will customise, test and validate interoperable and scalable technologiesfor large scale citizen-based data collection that lower costs compared to existing datasources. The planned demonstration activities will not only empower citizens' active roles inplanning, decision making and governance, but also improve land-use mapping in terms ofavailability of land-use data, consistency of time series of maps and accessibility to land-useinformation. Ground Truth 2.0 will also focus on creating sustainable business opportunitiesand market access (EU and worldwide) for the uptake of its products and services.GROUND TRUTH 2.0Environmental knowledge discovery of human sensed dataThe GROW Observatory employs a citizen platform and community to generate, share andutilize information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution until now not previouslyconsidered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil,whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a long-standing challenge forspace science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW willplace the burning issues of a specific community of interest at the centre of the project fromthe very start. Low cost but high power consumer sensing technology, and an easy to use SoilTesting Kit, lower barriers to entry. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) facilitates thescaling of rigorous citizen observation, while engagement is underpinned by storytelling andcommunity champions. A campaign-based approach engages citizens, scientists and policymakers to co-design coordinated sampling operations around particular needs and issues.LANDSENSEA Citizen Observatory and Innovation Marketplace for Land Use and Land Cover MonitoringThe overall aim of the LandSense project is to build an innovative citizen observatory in thefield of Land Use Land Cover (LULC), which collects data both actively (through citizens) andpassively (from authoritative, open access, and other citizen-based initiatives) and integratesthem into an open platform that provides valuable quality-assured in-situ data for SMEs, largerbusinesses, government agencies, NGOs and researchers. The LandSense citizen observatorywill integrate and scale-up existing technologies to offer four highly applicable services acrossthe LULC monitoring domain - LandSense Campaigner, Farmland Support, Change Detector,and Quality Assurance & Control. Once this federation of services is in place, the project willdemonstrate the four LandSense services through focused campaigns on monitoring landresources in both urban and rural contexts across the EU and internationally. In addition, theanticipated LandSense Services Incubator will create a collaborative network of relevantstakeholders, including a critical mass of SMEs, to stimulate rapid adoption and uptake ofLandSense products and services in the long run.©UNESCO-IHEGROW CoordinatorDrew Hemment - University of Dundeed.hemment@dundee.ac.ukSCENT CoordinatorAngelos Amditis - Institute of Communication and Computer Systems a.amditis@iccs.grLANDSENSE CoordinatorSteffen Fritz - International Institute for Applied Systems Analysisfritz@iiasa.ac.at GROUND TRUTH 2.0 CoordinatorUta Wehn - UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water EducationU.Wehn@unesco-ihe.orgNovember 2016 October 2019 September 2016 August 2019September 2016 August 2019September 2016 August 2020

The Next Generation Citizen Observatories

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International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)