Presented by Steffen Fritz (IIASA) at the Livestock Systems and Environment (LSE) Seminar, ILRI, Nairobi, 27 February 2014

1. Steffen Fritz
Livestock Systems and Environment (LSE) Seminar
ILRI, Nairobi, 27 February 2014
Geo-wiki.org: A global platform to visualize, crowd-source and improve information on global land cover and land use

2. Geo-wiki.org: a global platform to visualize, crowd-source and improve information on global land cover and land use
Steffen Fritz
Food and Water
Ecosystem Services and Management
Group Leader: Earth Observation Systems

3. Crowdsourcing
•Outsourcing to the crowd (Howe, 2006)
–E.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
–Wikipedia
With geographic context termed Volunteered Geographic Information
–Open Streetmap
–Geo-wiki
•Different levels of participation (passive and active)

5. Technology
In-Situ
Value Added
Mobile Phones
Mobile Money
Interested Citizens
Existing Communities
Improved
Land Cover data
Reliable statistics
Land-use change
Extending Geo-wiki to ground based data collection

7. GLOBIOM
A globalrecursively dynamic partial equilibrium modelintegrating the agricultural, bioenergyand forestry sectors with the aim to give policy advice on global issues concerning land use competition between the major land-based production sectors.
Environmental Resources and Development

8. Land Cover
•GLC2000 (1km)
•MODIS v.5 –2005 (500m)
•GlobCover2005, 2009 (300m)
•GLC v.2 (1km)
•Regional products (CORINE, Africover)
•National products

9. Disagreement in Africa in the cropland domain between GLC-2000 and MODIS v. 5
Fritz et al ERL, 2012

10. Why is it so important to improve global land cover?
Critical input dataset for many societal benefit areas, e.g. Ecosystems, Biodiversity, Energy, Climate, Disasters
Originally focus and applications -field of climate change projections
Now increasing demand from the integrated assessment community and the global biophysical modelling community, e.g. REDD
Cropland extent has been neglected, but is crucial for applications in the field of food security, assessing yield and production gaps
Also important for investment decisions both by governments as well as foundations (e.g. Gates)

11. Motivations behind Geo-Wiki
When different products are compared, there is a lot of disagreement between them
One product might say cropland, another grassland
Confusing if you are a user –which one is correct? Which is the best product to use?
Disagreement overall and/or spatially
Google Earth is one of the only affordable tools available to collect validation points globally (e.g. GlobCover, latest Chinese product)
Repository of validation/calibration data
Create a hybrid global land cover map (i.e. improve land cover)

12. www.geo-wiki.org

13. http://Geo-Wiki.org
•Geo-wiki makes GEO data easy to visualize and analyze.
•Volunteers from around the globe can classify Google Earth imagery, input their agreement/ disagreement with the existing data 12

14. Spatial Disagreements

17. Cropland

20. Fritz et al, 2013, Environmental Science and technology
Downgrading recent estimates of
land availability using crowdsourcing
Caiet al., 2011
1107 mil. hectares
Fritz et al.
375 mil. hectares

22. Field Size

23. Human Impact / Wilderness

24. Land acqisitions

25. Source: WorldMapper.org
Deaths related to Drought

26. Land Grabbing
Source: http://www.petergiovannini.com/Landgrabbing/index.html

28. Source: Anseeuwet al. (2012) –Transnational Land Deals for Agriculture in the Global South
(Hectares)
(# of
deals)

29. www.geo-wiki.org

32. `

34. Land Acquisition
Area
(from Land Matrix
Database)
+
Clear Evidence
of Settlements
(from Geo-Wiki
Hackathon)
=
Areas
of Conflict

35. Risk for conflict

36. Geo-Wiki Family of CrowdsourcingTools
Livestock
Cities

37. Choose a branch

44. Geo-Wiki Pictures

45. Photo upload

46. Provide feedback

47. Settings

48. Creating a Custom Legend

49. Custom Legend in the App

50. http://services.geo-wiki.org/SMVDemo/

51. Farmsupportapp

52. Expert
Crowd
Treated Crowd
How can we gain confidence in the crowdsourceddata?
Foody, See, Fritz et al., 2013

53. How can we integrate the crowdsourceddata?
-Calibration / Validation of Remotely Sensed Maps
-Map integration and hybrid map generation using many different sources including crowdsourcedand authorativedata

54. Geo-wiki.org or Tablets of phones: search for ‘cropland capture’
Release date is 10. November 2013

55. Thank you!
•fritz@iiasa.ac.at
•Geo-wiki.org