Research Project
LandSense: A Citizen Observatory and Innovation Marketplace for Land Use and Land Cover Monitoring
The overall aim of the LandSense project is to build an innovative citizen observatory in the field of LandUse LandCover(LULC), which collects data both actively (through citizens) and passively (from authoritative, open access, and other citizen-based initiatives) and integrates them into an open platform that provides valuable quality-assured in-situ data for SMEs, larger businesses, government agencies, NGOs and researchers. There is currently no single marketplace that brings together the demand for such in-situ data (i.e. ground-based data collection coupled with interpretation of remotely-sensed data) for LULC monitoring, and could potentially attract a vast community of users across numerous disciplines and sectors. LandSense will also provide multiple pathways for citizen empowerment that go beyond simple data collection by providing a range of engagement tools that will allow the voices of citizens to be heard.
The taks of GIScience Heidelberg will mostly deal with realizing the following objectives
- To implement the LandSense Citizen Observatory and its services in demonstration cases such as cost reduction and data conflation in monitoring land change
- To acquire and consolidate feedback from citizens and user-groups for the demonstration cases
- To evaluate (lessons learned and guidelines) on the uptake and engagement of citizens and determine upscaling potential of the demonstration cases
- To assess the quality control/assurance methods available for the demonstration cases,
- To source and process authoritative data for each demonstration case for validation purposes including authoritative ground reference data against which citizen-contributed data can be compared
- To source and process additional, complementary crowdsourced data streams from citizens (e.g. Flickr, OpenStreetMap) using openly available data mining methods, which could benefit each demonstration case
- To adapt and advance the COBWEB quality assurance service and quality workflows to fit the requirements of the demonstration cases
- To apply and iteratively refine the LandSense quality control and assurance service in order to validate citizen contributed data arising from the three demonstration cases
- To establish operational workflows for integrating data contributed by citizens into authoritative systems
- To establish protocols and benchmarking standards for quality assurance of citizen-contributed data in the area of LULC monitoring
Funding
EU Horizon 2020 Citizen Observatory Call
- Project Duration 2016-2020
OSMlanduse.org Our WebService providing LULC information derived from OpenStreetMap. (global)
OSMatrix Our WebService providing quality realted Metadata maps for OpenStreetMap (Europe only)
News
From 13 to 17 September 2021, the “International Transdisciplinarity Conference ITD21” took place in online format. The TdLab Geography participated with the contribution “Towards a co-design of adaptation measures to heat events in cities: examples from Heidelberg, Germany”. In a self-produced video, Nicole Aeschbach and Kathrin Foshag presented two studies on climate change adaptation from [...]
Urban green spaces (UGSs) can provide important ecosystem services for citizens and their well-being. To make use of these services according to UGS user demands, urban residents, tourists, and city administrations should know where UGSs are located, what qualities they have and how to reach them on convenient routes. A new open access paper at [...]
MapSwipe has ben announced as ‘App of the Day‘ in the Apple AppStore! (27.08.2021) Thank you to all our volunteers for the continued help and support which keeps the app going. Read the blogpost here: https://apps.apple.com/ca/story/id1559236909 The team at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) and the GIScience Research Group at Heidelberg University has shaped MapSwipe’s development from [...]
Hello and welcome back to the ohsome Region of the Month-blog post series where you can read about potential use cases of the ohsome API and maybe even get inspired to send some requests of your own. If you are new to the series you should definitely take a look at former blog posts, for example our last [...]
In the SYSSIFOSS project, we are investigating how we can take advantage of virtual laser scanning (VLS), the simulation of laser scanning in a computer environment, in forestry applications. These applications include survey planning and optimization, sensitivity analyses, and algorithm development. For example, VLS may be used to investigate the influence of different sensor and [...]
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We are happy to announce a revamped openrouteservice maps client for disaster management. It was built based on the new openrouteservice maps client, that is an open source route planner with plenty of features. Specific disaster features were incorporated via the development of developing plugins. It was developed and is maintained by the Heidelberg Institute for [...]
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a global mapping project which generates free geographical information through a community of volunteers. OSM is used in a variety of applications and for research purposes. However, it is also possible to import external data sets to OpenStreetMap. The opinions about these data imports are divergent among researchers and contributors, and the [...]
A recently published article in ‘Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability‘ investigates the role of digital technologies and data innovations, such as big data and citizen-generated data, to enable transformations to sustainability. We reviewed recent literature in this area and identified that the most prevailing assumption of work is related to the capacity of data to [...]
Our forest laser scanning dataset collected in the frame of the SYSSIFOSS project is now openly available through the PANGAEA Data Publisher: Weiser, H., Schäfer, J., Winiwarter, L., et al. (2021): Terrestrial, UAV-borne and airborne laser scanning point clouds of central European forest plots, Germany, with extracted individual trees and manual forest inventory measurements. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.933426 Until [...]
Project Partner
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis*; Austria
Birdlife International; UK
Sinergise; Slovenia
University of Nottingham; UK
InoSens doo; Serbia
GeoVille Information Systems GmbH; Austria
Environment Agency Austria; Austria
Institut National de l’Information Géographique et Forestière; France
European Citizen Science Association; Germany
StZ Felis; Germany
University of Heidelberg, GIScience Research Group; Germany
Wageningen University; The Netherlands
VU University Amsterdam; The Netherlands
Joint Research Centre; Italy
Secure Dimensions Germany
Friends of the Earth/Global 2000; Austria
City of Heidelberg; Germany
KriticalMass Ltd.; UK
