Exploitation of Crowdsourcing Tools and Earth Observation data: A Systematic Literature Review

Crowdsourcing is a method gaining ever wider use in practice and leverages human intelligence to solve problems in a considerable number of study fields. Howe (Howe 2006) coined the concept defining: “Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined network of people in the form of an open call.” This systematic review aims to understand the Crowdsourcing tools and Earth Observation (Satellite, aerial & in-situ) data and their contribution to environmental conservation and sustainability. The review involved 29 papers with particular focus on Technology Readiness Level (TRL), data fusion methods applied and topics such as types of users and their incentives and tools used to engage users and to collect the data. This article provides a glimpse of the Citizen Science (CS) data collection combined with Earth Observation data and explores the development of this swiftly emerging and evolving subject. We discuss two central implications in terms of research-implementation spaces for Crowdsourcing tools and EO data fusion: (1) the need to centralize the role of the people in order to have more accurate outcomes and (2) the most commonly used tools for crowdsourcing. This systematic literature review provides collective insights about the most commonly used tools for crowdsourcing that characterize well it’s one of the monitored domains, concluding that in complex environments remote sensing still exceeds citizen information. Our review identified limitations and recommendations derived from the monitored papers, that will improve the efficiency and provide an opportunity to look at multifaceted problems from numerous standpoints.