ESO researcher Linda See and colleagues [1] validated 53,000 samples of land cover data checked by both "amateurs" and "experts," over the past five years under the IIASA Geo-Wiki project. They reported in the journal, PLOS one, that citizen scientists performed as well as and in some cases better than experts, including experts in remote sensing and geospatial sciences.
Geo-Wiki uses satellite data to categorize land cover and identify places where people live and farm. The Earth Observation Systems (ESO) researchers checked 53,000 categorizations made by amateurs and experts, concluding that the former identified land cover correctly 69% of the time while so-called citizen scientists made correct classifications 62% of the time. Experts were better at identifying the specific land-cover types such as forest, farmland, grassland, or desert.
Citizen scientists are amateur and nonprofessional scientists who participate in scientific research voluntarily. Citizen science is also known as crowd science, crowd-sourced science, or networked science.
The researchers note that citizen science is becoming more important, given that government funding has been reduced for research and the development of the internet has allowed the participation of more people in research.
The Geo-Wiki concept has proved to be an attractive issue for the media [2] [3] [4].
Figure 1. The spatial distribution of crowdsourced data collected by the crowd, showing the degree of human impact globally.
References
[1] See L, Comber A, Salk C, Fritz S, van der Velde M, Perger C, Schill C, McCallum I, Kraxner F, Obersteiner M (2013). Comparing the quality of crowdsourced data contributed by experts and non-experts. 31 July DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0069958
[2] Spectrum. Episode.
[3] How do "Citizen Scientists" stack up against the experts? Citizen Science.
[4] Experts trumped by citizen scientists in land use analysis project. News, Science and Space.
Collaborators
Dr. Alexis Comber, Department of Geography, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
Research program
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313