Can citizen science assist digital soil mapping?

Crowdsourcing for agricultural applications: A review of uses and opportunities for a farmsourcing approach

“…527 In a similar study about the potential of citizen science for soil mapping, Rossiter et al (2015) 528 identified 9 groups of persons, sharing common work and/or interests, which may contribute to soil 529 data and information collection. In the particular case of farmsourcing, a large part of the inputs 530 should ideally be provided by contributors who belong to the farming sector.…”

Mapping and the Citizen Sensor

“…The role of citizens has been noted in a variety of subjects, from astronomy to zoology (Raddick and Szalay, 2010;Dickinson et al, 2010;Wiersma, 2010;Muller et al, 2015;Rossiter et al, 2015). Citizens have also already contributed greatly to mapping activities, including, for example, to major programmes such as bird species distribution mapping (Dickinson et al, 2010;Wiersma, 2010) and to the pioneering production of national land cover datasets such as the first land utilisation survey of the UK in the 1930s (Parece and Campbell, 2015).…”

Quantification of Uncertainty in Mathematical Models: The Statistical Relationship between Field and Laboratory pH Measurements

“…The rapid uptake of Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) [7,8] combined with citizen science has the potential to increase the geographic spread and density of observations to improve mapping and predictions of soil properties [9]. There are opportunities to exploit the thousands of legacy field pH measurements in government databases in combination with contemporary measurements from citizens to better understand the distribution and changes in soil acidity.…”

“…However, we are unaware of any attempts to harmonise field pH measurements with laboratory methods using extensive datasets that potentially contain a vast range of error sources. This has been identified as a challenge in the integration of citizen supplied measurements with those that are more precise [9].…”