CROWDVAL: Using Crowdsourcing and Innovative Approaches to Evaluate and Validate ESA’s Land Cover Products

The CrowdVal project had five main objectives:

1. Develop new innovative sampling schemes that allow a stratification and bias removal via road networks and that take other constraints into account for in-situ data collection;
2. Enhance LACO-Wiki and LACO-Wiki Mobile with the new sampling strategies, functionality for opportunistic map evaluation on the ground, and the addition of auxiliary data sets including Flickr geo-tagged pictures and time series of NDVI;
3. Create an open source version of LACO-Wiki Mobile;
4. Demonstrate the enhanced tools through crowdsourcing data collection campaigns (online and in-situ) to validate the first land cover map of Africa at a 20m spatial resolution; and
5. Investigate the possibility of developing a business model around an open source version of LACO-Wiki Mobile with a payment model around access to enhanced features, e.g. additional data sources, commercial satellite imagery, increased sample size, etc.