Abstract
If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of humans’ cognitive ability to interpret and classify environmental features. This research, with a focus on land cover, explores the extent to which citizen science can be used to sense and measure the environment and contribute to the creation and validation of environmental data. We examine methodological differences and humans’ ability to classify land cover given different information sources: a ground-based photo of a landscape versus a ground and aerial based photo of the same location. Participants are solicited from the online crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that across methods and in both ground-based, and ground and aerial based experiments, there are similar patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants across land cover classes. Understanding these patterns is critical to form a solid basis for using humans as sensors in earth observation.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Spatial Information Theory - 12th International Conference, COSIT 2015, Proceedings |
Editors | Scott Freundshuh, Sara Irina Fabrikant, Clare Davies, Scott Bell, Michela Bertolotto, Martin Raubal |
Publisher | Springer Verlag |
Pages | 289-305 |
Number of pages | 17 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783319233734 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 12th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2015 - Santa Fe, United States Duration: Oct 12 2015 → Oct 16 2015 |
Publication series
Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
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Volume | 9368 |
ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
Conference | 12th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2015 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Santa Fe |
Period | 10/12/15 → 10/16/15 |
Funding
This research is funded by the National Science Foundation (#0924534). We would like to thank the Degree Confluence Project for permission to use photos from the confluence.org website for our research. We would like to thank the members of the Human Factors in GIScience laboratory.
Keywords
- Citizen science
- Classification
- Land cover