On the Contribution of Volunteered Geographic Information to Land Monitoring Efforts

Abstract

Land-related inventories are important sources of geoinformation for environmentalists, researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, and ecologists. Traditionally, a considerable amount of energy, time, and money have been dedicated to map global/regional/local land use datasets. While remote sensing images and techniques along with field surveying have been the main sources of data for determining land use features, field measurements of ground truth have always amplified the required time and money, as well as information credibility. Nowadays, volunteered geographic information (VGI) has shown its great contributions to different scientific disciplines. This was made possible thanks to Web 2.0 technologies and GPS-enabled devices, which have advanced citizens knowledge-based projects and made them user-friendly for volunteered citizens to collect and share their knowledge about geographical objects. OpenStreetMap as one of those leading VGI projects has shown its great potential for collecting and providing land use information. The collaboratively collected 270 European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information land use features from diverse citizens could greatly back up the challenging element of land use mapping, which is in-field data gathering. Hence, in this literature we will look at the completeness, thematic accuracy and fitness for use of OpenStreetMap features for land mapping purposes over European countries. The empirical findings reveal that the degree of completeness varies widely ranging from 2% to 96% and overall and per-class thematic accuracies goes up to 80% and 96%, respectively compared to the European GMESUA datasets. Furthermore, more than 50% of land use features of eight European countries are mapped. This messages that the harnessing citizens' knowledge can play a great role in land mapping as an alternative and complementary data source.

The Tasks of the Crowd: A Typology of Tasks in Geographic Information Crowdsourcing and a Case Study in Humanitarian Mapping

“…As previous quality analyses of OpenStreetMap show (e.g., [47][48][49]), the completeness of OpenStreetMap data is heterogeneous, with some areas very well mapped, whilst other areas lacking basic objects. This suggests that OpenStreetMap may not be able to offer a complete reference data set for some areas.…”

The Value of OpenStreetMap Historical Contributions as a Source of Sampling Data for Multi-Temporal Land Use/Cover Maps

“…A common problem when processing OSM data is the presence of logical inconsistencies, such as overlapping features [6,9,34,35]. This problem is even more common when history files are used, since they contain records of every single modification.…”

“…OSM data still lack formal standards, such as those established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19157: 2013 Geographic information-Data quality [11,33]. Five data quality criteria are commonly mentioned in the literature: (1) Completeness, (2) temporal accuracy, (3) logical consistency, (4) positional accuracy, and (5) thematic accuracy [34][35][36].…”

“…The thematic accuracy [37] of the OSM platform's LULC mapping is currently a hot research topic [7,[9][10][11]34], and a number of studies have compared OSM data with authoritative reference data [6,7,16,33,35,38]. For example, two studies of mainland Portugal [6,7] found a total of 76.7% agreement between the data from OSM and CLC maps, with artificial surfaces, forests, and water bodies presenting promising results.…”

“…Completeness accuracy [23] is also commonly used to assess OSM data since it allows for the evaluation of territorial coverage. It has been used mainly to evaluate the completeness of OSM's data on road networks [22,39,40], buildings [23,41,42], and LULC features [6,9,34].…”