Nov 20, 2013 | Citizen Science, Environment, Food & Water
By Linda See, Research Scholar, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program
Researchers estimate we spend 3 billion hours a week on game playing. CC Image courtesy TheErin on Flickr
On a recent rush hour train ride in London I looked around to see just about everybody absorbed in their mobile phone or tablet. This in itself is not that unusual. But when I snooped over a few shoulders, what really surprised me was that most of those people were playing games. I hope this bodes well for our new game, Cropland Capture, introduced last week.
Cropland Capture is a game version of our citizen science project Geo-Wiki, which has a growing network of interested experts and volunteers who regularly help us in validating land cover through our competitions. By turning the idea into a game, we hope to reach a much wider audience.
Playing Cropland Capture is simple: look at a satellite image and tell us if you see any evidence of cropland. This will help us build a better map of where cropland is globally, something that is surprisingly uncertain at the moment. This sort of data is crucial for global food security, identifying where the big gaps in crop yields are, and monitoring crops affected by droughts, amongst many other applications.
Gamification and citizen science
The idea of Cropland Capture is not entirely unique. There are an astonishingly large number of games available for high tech gaming consoles, PCs and increasingly, mobile devices. While the majority of these games are pure entertainment, some are part of an emerging genre known as ”serious games” or ”games with a purpose.” These are games that either have an educational element or through the process of playing them, you can help scientists in doing their research. One of the most successful examples is the game FoldIt, where teams of players work together to decode protein structures. This is not an easy task for a computer to do, but some people are exceptionally talented at seeing these patterns. The result has even led to new scientific discoveries that have been published in high level journals such as Nature.
Jane McGonigal, in her book Reality is Broken (Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World), estimates that we spend 3 billion hours a week alone on game playing, and that the average young person spends more time gaming by the end of their school career than they have actually spent in school. Although these figures may seem alarming, McGonigal argues that there are many positive benefits associated with gaming, including the development of problem-solving skills, the ability to cope better with problems such as depression or chronic pain, and even the possibility that we might live ten years longer if we played games. If people spent just a fraction of this time on “serious games” like FoldIt and Cropland Capture, imagine how much could be achieved.
Since the game started last Friday, 185 players have validated 119,777 square kilometers of land (more than twice the land area of Denmark).
Cropland Capture is easy to play – simply swipe the picture left or right to say whether there is cropland or not.
Get in the game
You can play Cropland Capture on a tablet (iPad or Android) or mobile phone (iPhone or Android). Download the game from the Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. For those who prefer an online version, you can also play the game at: http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/croplandcapture/. For more information about the game, check out our videos at: http://www.geo-wiki.org/games/instructions-videos/. During the next six months, we will be providing regular updates on Twitter (@CropCapture) and Facebook.
The game is being played for six months, where the top scorer each week will be crowned the weekly winner. The 25 weekly winners will then be entered into a draw at the end of the competition to win three big prizes: an Amazon Kindle, a smartphone, and a tablet. The game was launched only last week so there is plenty of time to get involved and help scientific research.
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Aug 21, 2013 | Citizen Science
By Linda See, Research Scholar, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program
Humans have a long history of map-making that can be traced back to cave paintings older than 20,000 years, and detailed maps made by the ancient Romans, Greeks, and Chinese. These maps tell the story of exploration and changing borders of states, countries, and populations.
This screenshot shows our Geo-Wiki tool for collecting data from the crowd.
Until recently, military and government mapping agencies have been entirely in control of mapping, but this is changing. The rise of neogeography and user-generated geo-referenced content online has led to a new generation of community-based maps such as OpenStreetMap. Enabled by interactive web technology (Web 2.0) and the GPS in mobile phones, people are now mapping different aspects of the Earth’s surface through crowdsourcing. This new model has proved its worth in cases like the post-disaster recovery, e.g. the devastating earthquake in Haiti.
The trouble with maps
Even in this age of satellites and space technology, it is far from easy to generate good automated representations of the Earth’s surface. While satellite imagery has allowed us to create global maps of land cover—the various materials such as grass, trees, water, and cities that cover the Earth’s surface—at various resolutions from 10 km to 30 m, there are two main problems with all the different products that are now currently available. The first is that these products have accuracies that are only between 65 to 75%. Secondly, when they are compared with one another, there are large spatial disagreements between them. If you are a user of these products, which one should you choose? How can you trust any one of these products when they have uncertainties as large as 25 to 35%? And more importantly, without good baseline information about the Earth’s land cover, such as the amount of forest or cropland, how can we possibly predict what will happen in the future?
The Geo-Wiki Project
Our Geo-Wiki project aims to solve this problem through crowdsourcing. With open access to satellite imagery through Google Earth and Bing Maps, citizens and interested experts can help us better characterize land cover, to correct existing land cover maps or build new ones. Geo-Wiki is a simple set of tools to sample the Earth’s surface, which allows a network of Geo-Wiki volunteers to tell us what type of land cover is visible from Google Earth or Bing Maps.
This map of cropland in Ethiopia was created from crowd-sourced data.
One example of our crowd-sourcing campaigns was focused on mapping cropland in Ethiopia. Over a three week period, we collected more than 80,000 samples across the country, roughly 5% of the area of Ethiopia. Using simple interpolation, we have demonstrated that a cropland map of Ethiopia, a key type of land cover, can be created very easily, with just a small crowd of volunteers. We validated the map using an official validation data set from the GOFC/GOLD reference portal as well as other crowdsourced data collected through Geo-Wiki. The results of this study showed that the map is considerably more accurate than global land cover maps for Ethiopia when considering only cropland. You can find more details about this research at:
See, L. McCallum, I., Fritz, S., Perger, C., Kraxner, F., Obersteiner, M., Deka Baruah, U., Mili, N. and Ram Kalita, N. 2013. Mapping Cropland in Ethiopia using Crowdsourcing. International Journal of Geosciences, 4(6A1), 6-13 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ijg.2013.46A1002.
Get involved
The Ethiopian example is just the tip of the mapping iceberg. As more citizens get involved in mapping land cover online—for example with our Geo-Wiki Pictures app, we could revolutionize land cover mapping in the future.
If you are interested in helping us improve land cover, register at http://www.geo-wiki.org or find us on Facebook to join our crowdsourcing network and learn more about upcoming crowdsourcing campaigns.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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