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A B S T R A C TIn this paper we explore the new possibilities for early crop yield assessment at the local scale arising from the availability of dynamic crop growth models and of downscaled multi-model ensemble seasonal forecasts. We compare the use of the latter with other methods, based on crop growth models driven by observed climatic data only. The soil water balance model developed and used at ARPA Emilia-Romagna (CRITERIA) was integrated with crop growth routines from the model WOFOST 7.1. Some validation runs were first carried out and we verified with independent field data that the new integrated model satisfactorily simulated above-ground biomass and leaf area index. The model was then used to test the feasibility of using downscaled multi-model ensemble seasonal hindcasts, coming from the DEMETER European research project, in order to obtain early (i.e. 90, 60 and 30 d before harvest) yield assessments for winter wheat in northern Italy. For comparison, similar runs with climatology instead of hindcasts were also carried out. For the same purpose, we also produced six simple linear regression models of final crop yields on within season (end of March, April and May) storage organs and above-ground biomass values. Median yields obtained using downscaled DEMETER hindcasts always outperformed the simple regression models and were substantially equivalent to the climatology runs, with the exception of the June experiment, where the downscaled seasonal hindcasts were clearly better than all other methods in reproducing the winter wheat yields simulated with observed weather data. The crop growth model output dispersion was almost always significantly lower than the dispersion of the downscaled ensemble seasonal hindcast used as input for crop simulations.

While spatial information quality is an established discipline in traditional scientific geographical information (GI), standards and protocols for representing and assessing the quality of geographic contributions generated by volunteers or by the generic 'web crowd' are still missing. This work offers an analysis of strategies for quality control and describes a simple representation of the components of the quality in crowdsourced GI. In this framework, and based on the research carried out in Criscuolo et al. (2014), we also introduce a methodology for quality assessment, based on the given representation, which goes beyond the limitations of previous methods in the literature defined for a specific purpose, being able to deal with many quality features, GI categories, and types of application. The method is designed as a decision making approach, so flexible as to take into account the purpose of GI analysis, and so transparent as to make explicit the criteria driving to quality evaluation, namely the quality features (e.g. the credibility of the volunteers, or the accuracy of the spatial features, etc.) and their relevance.

European Alpine glaciology has a long tradition of studies and activities, in which researchers have often relied on the field work of some specialized volunteer operators. Despite the remarkable results of this cooperation, some problems in field data harmonization and in covering the whole range of monitored glaciers are still present. Moreover, dynamics of reduction, fragmentation and decline, which in recent decades characterize Alpine glaciers, make more urgent the need to improve spatial and temporal monitoring, still maintaining adequate quality standards. Scientific field monitoring activities on Alpine glaciers run parallel to a number of initiatives by individuals and amateur associations, keepers of alternative, experiential and para-scientific knowledge of the glacial environment. Problems of harmonization, coordination, recruitment and updating can be addressed with the help of a collaborative approach-citizen science-like-in which the scientific coordination guarantees information quality and web 2.0 tools operate as mediators between expert glaciologists and non-expert contributors. This paper gives an overview of glaciological information currently produced in the European Alpine region, representing it in an organized structure, functional to the OPEN ACCESS