Smart Toolbox for Engaging Citizens into a People-Centric Observation Web
Whilst citizen participation in environmental policy making is still in its infancy, there are signs of a growing level of interest. The majority of citizens, though, both as individuals and as groups often feel disengaged from influencing environmental policies. They also remain unaware of publicly available information, such as the GEOSS or Copernicus initiatives. SCENT, a three-years European project, which consist of 10 partners from 6 countries, will alleviate this barrier by enabling citizens to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers by monitoring land-cover/use changes in their everyday activities. This will be implemented through the development of the SCENT smart toolbox, a crowdsourcing platform which will be used to collect images and text from citizens. This will extend the in-situ infrastructure to augment, complement and update current land-cover maps.
Coupled with this platform is the SCENT intelligence engine which will utilise innovative machine learning to classify and annotate images and text sourced from citizens and existing open platforms. In addition, a serious gaming application will be developed to annotate unutilised images from such platforms (e.g. Flickr) as complementary data sources to quantify the impact of land-cover and land-use changes in the context of ood risk prediction.
The project will test and validate the SCENT toolbox in two large scale pilots, the urban case of Kifisos river in Attica, Greece and the rural case of Danube Delta in Romania. The anticipated people-centric observation web will be OGC-compliant and serve as a valuable resource to GEOSS portal. otate unutilised images from such platforms (e.g. Flickr) as complementary data sources to quantify the impact of land-cover and land-use changes in the context of flood risk prediction.
ICCS is the SCENT project coordinator and the Risk and Mitigation Planning Manager and is responsible for the overall administration and financial mmanagement of the project (WP9). In addition ICCS leads the work that is related to the deployment of ready-to-fly digital sensors that will be mounted on multicopters, for quantitative mapping and monitoring parameters, adapted for the use of non-specialists.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 688930.