LandSense is a modern citizen observatory for Land Use & Land Cover (LULC) monitoring, connecting citizens with Earth Observation (EO) data to transform current approaches to environmental decision making across urban greenspaces, agricultural management and biodiversity/habitat threats. The project involved demonstration pilots in which citizens used their own devices to supplement the existing monitoring through interactive reporting, gaming applications and mapathons. Some of the LandSense pilots focused on in-situ observations using mobile apps, whereas other pilots were centered around satellite-image interpretations during dedicated mapathons. Particular attention was given to quality assurance of citizen observations and defining methods for integrating citizen science data with authoritative LULC data.
The main objective of the project under the Agricultural Land Use theme was to establish a collaborative framework to create synergies between EO systems and crowdsourcing of data (“farmers as sensors”). Tools were developed to supply farmers with information on the vegetation health status from remotely sensed EO data and in this way provide an incentive to share data on crops grown, crop phenological information, management information, occurrence of pests and diseases and impacts of extreme weather.
The Serbian demonstration case involved the development of the CropSupport app, which offered daily decision support with reliable access to satellite data (Sentinel-2) and weather updates to farmers, enabling them to make better informed decisions around protecting and maximizing yield potential. At the same time, farmers would collect and share information about their crops, helping scientists and other stakeholders to better understand the dynamics of agricultural production under changing climate conditions.
