Geoinformatics in Citizen Science

Abstract

This editorial introduces the special issue entitled “Geoinformatics in Citizen Science” of the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. The issue includes papers dealing with three main topics. (1) Key tasks of citizen science (CS) in leveraging geoinformatics. This comprises descriptions of citizen science initiatives where geoinformation management and processing is the key means for discovering new knowledge, and it includes: (i) “hackAIR: Towards Raising Awareness about Air Quality in Europe by Developing a Collective Online Platform” by Kosmidis et al., (ii) “Coupling Traditional Monitoring and Citizen Science to Disentangle the Invasion of Halyomorpha halys” by Malek et al., and (iii) “Increasing the Accuracy of Crowdsourced Information on Land Cover via a Voting Procedure Weighted by Information Inferred from the Contributed Data” by Foody et al. (2) Evaluations of approaches to handle geoinformation in CS. This examines citizen science initiatives which critically analyze approaches to acquire and handle geoinformation, and it includes: (iv) “CS Projects Involving Geoinformatics: A Survey of Implementation Approaches” by Criscuolo et al., (v) “Obstacles and Opportunities of Using a Mobile App for Marine Mammal Research” by Hann et al., (vi) “OSM Data Import as an Outreach Tool to Trigger Community Growth? A Case Study in Miami” by Juhász and Hochmair, and (vii) “Experiences with Citizen-Sourced VGI in Challenging Circumstances“ by Hameed et al. (3) Novel geoinformatics research issues: (viii) “A New Method for the Assessment of Spatial Accuracy and Completeness of OpenStreetMap Building Footprints” by Brovelli and Zamboni, (ix) “A Citizen Science Approach for Collecting Toponyms” by Perdana and Ostermann, and (x) “An Automatic User Grouping Model for a Group Recommender System in Location-Based Social Networks” by Khazaei and Alimohammadi.