The involvement of citizens in scientific activities from data collection to hypothesis generation is referred to as citizen science. The majority of citizen involvement tends to be on the data collection side, where numerous crowdsourcing platforms have been built to involve citizens in image interpretation, online mapping and other micro-tasks that would not otherwise have been possible. There has been increasing attention directed towards how citizen-contributed data can be used for improved calibration and validation of satellite-derived products, such as land cover, as well as data for modeling purposes.

This poster will provide examples of tools and applications in the area of citizen science and crowdsourcing within the Earth Observation Systems group of the IIASA Ecosystem Services Program. These tools include Geo-Wiki, mobile gaming apps such as Cropland Capture and Picture Pile, and other high-frequency mobile data collection tools. Some of the crowdsourced data have led to improved global maps of cropland, crop-type distributions and forest cover, information which is needed by economic land-use models such as the Global Biosphere Management Model and crop-growth models such as the Environmental Policy Integrated Model. Other data have the potential to help calibrate and validate these models, for example, through information on farm-level crop types and management information. These various activities, and their linkages to systems analysis work at IIASA, will be showcased on the poster.