From the Ground to the Cloud: Groundtruthing Environmental Change

Over 6 billion people in the world have mobile service. Over 70% of smartphone users worldwide and 50% of smartphone users in the US have Android phones or tablets. Numbers like that present a great opportunity for citizen... [ view full abstract ]

Over 6 billion people in the world have mobile service. Over 70% of smartphone users worldwide and 50% of smartphone users in the US have Android phones or tablets. Numbers like that present a great opportunity for citizen science applications.

Open-source tools for collecting data from the field, like Open Data Kit, are leveraging rapid growth of the Android platform to gather local information on the ground to send it up to the cloud. Today, anyone can use their Android phone to go out in the field, in an offline environment, collect information and create a map when they’re back online.

At the same time, access to cloud computing is accelerating scientists’ ability to better understand our planet. Google Earth Engine is a planetary-scale platform for analyzing the world’s environmental data. With over 40 years of satellite imagery from USGS on Google’s cloud, anyone can see how our planet has changed over time. Scientists using Earth Engine have been able to do things never before possible, like create the world’s first map of global forest change. By leveraging data from citizen scientists in the field, researchers can improve their environmental models.

We’ll examine real-world applications of these technologies and reveal some of the challenges that remain. Early success stories offer optimism about how citizen scientists could contribute to groundtruth these analyses, to provide a more accurate picture on topics like global deforestation maps.