Arctic Crowdsourcing

The Arctic Crowdsourcing project has been successfully completed. The objective was to create an enhanced Earth Observations (EO) services for Arctic applications planned for C-CORE’s Coresight Platform to include community/crowd sourced very high-resolution drone data, ESA Sentinel mission data and other forms of field data that support Arctic stakeholder needs.  

The Arctic Crowdsourcing project included:

1)  Engagement of Arctic communities to develop skills around drone operations, as well as GIS, and EO satellite knowledge. The community engagement also investigated remote sensing based services for that could directly benefit communities.

2) The development Arctic Crowdsourcing Service for collecting community-sourced knowledge, targeting community sourced Drone Data, and geotagged video and image data.

3) The prototype development of enhanced EO based services and incorporate other community sourced data or new products created via the Polar TEP.

The developed products were on display and ready for live demos at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium May 2019 in the C-CORE booth, and available publically to all, after the symposium.

The project involved direct engagement with community members via several face-to-face meetings with communities, supporting the establishment of training programs and the hiring of local commercial drone operators to collect test scenario data.  Initial community engagement highlighted two obstacles to support crowdsourcing of drone imagery which were the lack of in region drone operation skills, and lack of high bandwidth connectivity to transfer the high number of large bandwidth files created by drones and their higher resolution sensors. 

While this project has completed, the opportunity of developing Arctic crowdsourced drone data will continue to be developed as numbers of drone operators in the Arctic increase, and further engagement and feedback are received from Arctic communities.