Augmented Citizen Science for Environmental Monitoring and Education

Abstract

Environmental monitoring and ecological studies detect and visualize changes of the environment over time. Some agencies are committed to document the development of conservation and status of geotopes and geosites, which is time-consuming and cost-intensive. Citizen science and crowd sourcing are modern approaches to collect data and at the same time to raise user awareness for environmental changes. <br><br> Citizen scientists can take photographs of point of interests (POI) with smartphones and the PAN App, which is presented in this article. The user is navigated to a specific point and is then guided with an augmented reality approach to take a photo in a specific direction. The collected photographs are processed to time-lapse videos to visualize environmental changes. Users and experts in environmental agencies can use this data for long-term documentation.

Integration of Terrestrial and Uav Photogrammetry for the Assessment of Collapse Risk in Alpine Glaciers

“…People may be trained on how and where images should be collected, while the processing stage may be left to experts. As proposed in Albers et al (2017), some apps may be also developed to guide users to capture the images following a precise scheme and to obtain redundant data acquisition. As shown in Paragraph 2.3.7, the presence of stable areas may help to register photogrammetric blocks collected at different epochs without the need of GCPs.…”

AR in the Architecture Domain: State of the Art

“…It is the only opensource (GPLv3) AR SDK dedicated to Android applications, supporting build locationbased and marker-based AR experiences. Evidence of this tool appears in [14], and environmental documentation in [146].…”

Geographic citizen science design:

“…They need to be aware of new practices and strategies that might improve existing activities and tasks or introduce completely new ones to achieve the project aims better and to meet user needs. Examples can be found in the developments of virtual and augmented reality software and hardware that can be helpful in educating and training participants (Albers, de Lange and Xu 2017) in order to perform the tasks required over the course of a project. Also, there are the developments regarding the Internet of things (Ashton 2009) which, despite the heterogeneity in the approaches and the varying standards so far, can blend smoothly with input from human participation ) and organise, improve and extend the reach of geographic citizen science projects in new ways.…”