27 April 2018 - 31 May 2018

Yellow Flowers citizen science campaign

Citizen scientists are taking pictures of flowering rapeseed in a new twitter campaign for environmental monitoring


©Creative Travel Projects|Shutterstock

©Creative Travel Projects|Shutterstock

One of Europe’s main crops for producing oil and animal feed, rapeseed also makes for beautiful sights of golden fields when in bloom. In a new social media campaign supported by IIASA's H2020 LandSense project, the European Commission's science and knowledge service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) is engaging citizen scientists in data collection on flowering rapeseed to help better understand the crop’s life cycle and improve crop models and production forecasts across the European Union.

 

The campaign asks citizen scientists to take pictures of flowering rapeseed in their areas and share them on twitter with the geo-location and the hashtag #YellowFlowersEU. Researchers from the JRC will collect and use the data, including picture locations and timestamps, to improve EU satellite studies.

 

This campaign is a pilot project that explores the potential of crowdsourced data collection as ground-based evidence to support Copernicus satellite observations. The flowering rapeseed project is linked to IIASA’s H2020 LandSense project, which is developing a Citizen Observatory that empowers citizens to engage in land use and land cover monitoring.

 

The campaign runs through 31 May 2018. Click here to join!


About LandSense

LandSense is building an innovative citizen observatory to uncover the collective potential of citizen-powered science and satellite imagery to improve the way we see, map and understand the world. The LandSense Citizen Observatory, funded by the Horizon 2020 program, will offer modern community-based environmental monitoring tools and information systems to help transform decision making. Through Earth Observation (EO)-driven mobile applications, LandSense promotes citizens to not only play a key role in environmental monitoring, but also to be directly involved in the co-creation of such applications. Currently within the EU’s EO monitoring framework, especially in the domain of Land Use Land Cover (LULC) dynamics, there is a need for low-cost methods for acquiring high quality in-situ data to create timely, accurate and well-validated environmental monitoring products. LandSense aims to disrupt the EO data economy by creating marketable solutions that can provide a step-change in LULC monitoring activities both within and beyond Europe.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 689812





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Last edited: 27 April 2018

CONTACT DETAILS

Steffen Fritz

Program Director and Principal Research Scholar Strategic Initiatives Program

Principal Research Scholar Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Inian Moorthy

Research Scholar Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Linda See

Principal Research Scholar Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Dahlia Domian

Program and Project Officer/Finance Coordinator Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Program and Project Officer/Finance Coordinator Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Program and Project Officer/Finance Coordinator Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

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