A discussion of crowdsourced geographic information initiatives and big Earth observation data architectures for land-use and land-cover monitoring

The effective monitoring of land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) is a basic requirement for understanding socio-enviromental processes of local to global scales. Remote sensing data and methods have long been established as the most effective approach for monitoring LULCC. The potential for further increasing the effectiveness of this approach is proportional to the astonishingly large amount of satellite imagery provided, many times free-of-cost, by space agencies worldwide. However, scientists still lack of ways of organizing, structuring and analyzing this huge amount of remote sensing data in a way that leverages administrative and scientific LULCC monitoring. Hence, an efficient image data storage, query and processing architecture that manages different satellite specifications and climatic conditions is required for generating and sharing updated and area-extensive LULCC information.
Furthermore, because reliable LULCC monitoring with remote sensing data requires extensive training and validation analysis performed by humans, the
potential of big Earth Observation (EO) data for LULCC monitoring is still limited by the amount and time availability of the analysts involved in the project. In a recently accepted paper at the VGI-ALIVE Workshop at AGIlE, we will discuss the potential of Citizen Science for improving the feasibility and effectiveness of LULCC monitoring supported by big EO data architectures. We put forward general ideas on how to promote and stimulate an active involvement of citizens in EO data analytics for LULCC monitoring. For that, we briefly present and critically evaluate how existing approaches that allow citizens to contribute with up-to-date and detailed LULCC information mitigate the issue of exhaustive sampling required in LULCC monitoring with automatic remote sensing image classification.

Hear the results and full story at VGI-ALIVE Workshop at AGILE 2018 (Lund, Sweden) and join the discussion there!

De Assis, L. F.; K. R. Ferreira, L. Vinhas, T. Novack, A. Zipf (2018 accepted): A discussion of crowdsourced geographic information initiatives and big Earth observation data architectures for land-use and land-cover monitoring. VGI-ALIVE Workshop. AGILE 2018 Conference, Lund, Sweden.