Beyond sharing Earth observations

By Linda See and Ian McCallum, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program, Earth Observation Team

Land cover is of fundamental importance for environmental research. It  serves as critical baseline information for many large-scale models, for example in developing future scenarios of land use and climate change. However, current land cover products are not accurate enough for many applications and to improve them we need better and more accessible validation data. We recently argued this point in a Nature correspondence, and here we take the opportunity to expand on our brief letter.

In the last decade, multiple global land cover data products have been developed. But when these products are compared, there are significant amounts of spatial disagreement across land cover types. Where one map shows cropland, another might show forest domains. These discrepancies persist even when you take differences in the legend definitions into account. The reasons for this disagreement include the use of different satellite sensors, different classification methodologies, and the lack of sufficient data from the ground, which are needed to train, calibrate, and validate land cover maps.

An artist’s illustration of the NASA Landsat Data Continuity Mission spacecraft, one of the many satellites that collects data about Earth’s surface. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Landsat

A recent Comment in Nature (Nature, 513, 30-31; 2014) argued that freely available satellite imagery will improve science and environmental-monitoring products. Although we fully agree that greater open access and sharing of satellite imagery is urgently needed, we believe that this plea neglects a crucial component of land cover generation: the data required to calibrate and validate these products.

At present, remotely sensed global land cover is not accurate enough for monitoring biodiversity loss and ecosystem dynamics or for many of the other applications for which baseline land cover and change over time are critical inputs. When Sentinel-2–a new Earth observation satellite to be launched in 2015 by the European Space Agency–comes online, it will be possible to produce land cover maps at a resolution of 10 meters.  Although this has incredible potential for society as a whole, these products will only be useful if they represent the land cover more accurately than the current products available. To improve accuracy, more calibration and validation data are required. Although more investment is clearly needed in ground-based measurements, there are other, complementary solutions to this problem.

Map showing cropland disagreement between two different land cover maps,  GlobCover and GLC2000: all colors represent disagreement. Credit: Geo-Wiki.org, Google Earth

Not only should governments and research institutes be urged to share imagery, they should also share their calibration and validation data. Some efforts have been made by the Global Observation for Forest Cover and Land Dynamics  (GOFC-GOLD) in this direction, but there is an incredible amount of data that remains locked within institutes and agencies. The atmospheric community shares their data much more readily than the Earth Observation (EO) community, even though we would only benefit by doing so.

Crowdsourcing of calibration and validation data also has real potential for vastly increasing the amount of data available to improve classification algorithms and the accuracy of land cover products. The IIASA Geo-Wiki project is one example of a growing community of crowdsourcing applications that aim to improve the mapping of the Earth’s surface.

New apps developed by IIASA’s Earth Observation Team aim to involve people around the world in on-the-ground data validation efforts.

Geo-Wiki is a platform which provides citizens with the means to engage in environmental monitoring of the earth by providing feedback on existing spatial information overlaid on satellite imagery or by contributing entirely new data. Data can be input via the traditional desktop platform or mobile devices, with campaigns and games used to incentivize input. Resulting data are available without restriction.

Another major research projects we are using to address many of these issues identified above is the ERC Project Crowdland .

More information

• Nature Correspondence: Satellite data: Beyond sharing Earth observations
• Geo-Wiki.org
• IIASA EOS Research Group
• Crowdland Project

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.