The Geo-Wiki campaign will contribute to more accurate mapping of the drivers of forest loss in the tropics. This is crucial to guide policies that can protect tropical forests, not only the most biodiverse areas of our planet, but also buffers to the ever-increasing effects of climate change.
The campaign is part of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) project, where IIASA is one of the collaborating partners. ILUC aims to review the report from the European Commission to the Parliament on the status of production expansion of relevant food and feed crops worldwide (COM(2019) 142), focusing on the quantification of feedstock expansion onto land with high carbon stock, as input for the determination of high ILUC fuels.
As a participant of the campaign,you will be asked to do a bit of detective work: Find out what happened to areas that had tree-cover before 2008. Using a combination of very high-resolution imagery, you can figure out what was the cause of the tree-loss. We will aim to classify 150K locations during the campaign.
Important: You will need Google Earth installedin your computer. It is an essential tool to determine the drivers of tropical forest loss but also is your gatewayfor an exciting trip around the world! Use the time series tools in Google Earth and in Geo-Wiki (Sentinel time series imagery) to do correct classifications.
The campaign aims to give citizens the chance to contribute to science and to be a learning opportunity. Based on our experiences from previous campaigns we would like to remind our participants the following rules, to make the campaign a fair and nice environment for everybody:
We would like to reward our citizen scientists with prizes! The campaign's top 30 participants who contribute the most data (measured by both quality and quantity) will win prizes based on their place on the leaderboard. Additionally, all participants that have contributed high quality data and a minimum of 1000 validations will be allowed to opt-in to jointly develop a data descriptor scientific article detailing the campaign results together with IIASA scientists. Furthermore, participants that give us consistent comments throughout the campaign (in the comment box in the Geo-Wiki interface), will receive a surprise prize at the end. The comment box is there to highlight circumstances/ problems or locations’ characteristics worth mentioning. We will analyze all comments when the campaign finishes so be brief and write just some keywords
| Ranking | Prize (€) | Ranking | Prize (€) | Ranking | Prize (€) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 300 | 11 | 200 | 21 | 75 | ||
| 2 | 275 | 12 | 200 | 22 | 75 | ||
| 3 | 275 | 13 | 175 | 23 | 75 | ||
| 4 | 275 | 14 | 175 | 24 | 75 | ||
| 5 | 275 | 15 | 150 | 25 | 75 | ||
| 6 | 250 | 16 | 150 | 26 | 75 | ||
| 7 | 250 | 17 | 125 | 27 | 75 | ||
| 8 | 250 | 18 | 125 | 28 | 75 | ||
| 9 | 250 | 19 | 125 | 29 | 75 | ||
| 10 | 250 | 20 | 125 | 30 | 75 |
To receive any of the prizes mentioned above, your relative quality score should be above average. This is to ensure that we are as fair as possible while maintaining a minimum level of quality. However, we require a minimum of 1000 validations to qualify for a prize.
The monetary prizes will be delivered using Paypal, so to access to these you must have a verified Paypal account.
If you disagree with a control classification, please send us an email with the reasons why. If this is our mistake, we will adjust your score, removing any penalties and applying the correct points to your overall score.
Please contact us for further information and enquiries.