CS4SEHAG

Conventional methods for monitoring alpine geosystems are either spatially or temporally limited. Although airborne laserscanning or aerial images provide area wide highly accurate 3D information, due to associated costs they can only be acquired once every few years. While measurement stations have high temporal resolution, they are static and only represent their close surrounding. Terrestrial laserscanning, drones or classical fieldwork require expertise knowledge and can only be carried out within limited selected time periods. Hence, even if multiple systems and approaches are combined a gap in the observation of these environments, both spatially and temporally, is present. This information gap prevents us from increasing our understanding of the ongoing changes in these geosystems On the other hand, citizens have unique local knowledge of these environments, regularly spend time there and care about their condition and preservation. Combined with the wide availability of smartphones, which allow everyone to document their surroundings without additional costs at high spatial and temporal resolution, we believe that citizen science can play a fundamental role in closing the gap in monitoring alpine geosystems. Hence, in the course of the project we will develop a web app which will allow citizens to document their observations of ongoing changes in selected alpine environments through images. Those images will be further semi-automatically processed in order to use them subsequently in spatial analysis. However, we will not only concentrate on data acquisition: To foster long-term participation and provide participants with a unique user experience, we will implement and evaluate various forms of visualizations, combined with gaming elements and augmented reality.