Milutin Milenkovic
Milutin Milenković is a research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. His current research combines Earth observation and citizen science to monitor environmental change, particularly tropical forest growth and resilience. He is also a guest researcher in the Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing lab at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and a guest lecturer at Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
Sessions
Policies on opening satellite image archives have shifted earth observation to the big data era. However, due to the associated data-hungry analytics, such as deep learning, satellite observations have to be combined (trained and then validated) with a large amount of in-situ data to get meaningful results. Yet, the collection of in-situ data is often laborious, and the resulting observations are rarely open for others to use. To bridge this in-situ data gap, this workshop will analyze the suitability of a citizen science mobile app for measuring biomass and tree species of individual trees and forest plots, i.e., the TreeQuest and ForestQuest modules, respectively. The app has been developed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and will be freely available for Android and iOS phones by the workshop. We will first present the app and then initiate a citizen science campaign motivating the conference participants to take part by testing the app and surveying selected trees around the conference center. Members from TU Wien will measure and model selected trees using a terrestrial laser scanner. The resulting 3D point cloud will allow the extraction of detailed information on vegetation structure, which will be used for comparison with the mobile app and forest inventory measurements acquired with traditional forest measurement tools (e.g. caliper, vertex). Finally, we will present the results and discuss the performance and potential further development of the app with workshop participants.
The workshop will also discuss the relevance of collected data and the approach for the two ongoing initiatives such as (a) the Citizens for Copernicus project that is funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, application No. 47907528, and (b) the Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure project funded from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101059548.