LandSense is a project funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme within the topic of “Demonstrating the concept of ‘Citizen Observatories’”. ECSA is one of 17 partners in the LandSense consortium that includes partners from various sectors of society, like NGOs, research and education organizations, public authorities or enterprises.

The main aim of LandSense is to build an innovative citizen observatory in the field of Land Use Land Cover (LULC), which collects data both actively (through citizens) and passively (from authoritative, and open access sources) and integrates them to provide valuable quality-assured in-situ data for SMEs, larger businesses, government agencies, NGOs and researchers. In the words of LandSense coordinator Dr. Steffen Fritz, “through citizen-powered science LandSense aims to deliver concrete, measureable and quality-assured ground-based data that will complement existing monitoring systems.”

The LandSense tools and services will be tested and evaluated through three specific demonstration cases addressing (i) Monitoring Land Change in the Urban and Rural Landscape; (ii) Monitoring Agricultural Land Use and Provision of Value-added Agricultural Services; (iii) Forest and Habitat Monitoring using Innovative Technologies.

Citizen engagement is pivotal to the success of the LandSense project. Among others, ECSA plays a leading role in the task of outlining user requirements, identifying barriers, and co-designing engagement strategies, regarding the development process and outputs of LandSense. This will iteratively both support and be informed by the implementation of the LandSense demonstration cases. Other outcomes include contributing to the development of action plans and campaign strategies for each demonstration case, or informing the development of LandSense’s technical infrastructure, tools and services. ECSA represents an active community of practitioners and researchers, bringing best practice experience on how to develop and manage citizen science projects into LandSense. Therefore, ECSA is an excellent platform for engaging the citizen science community with the LandSense project. The synergistic potential is high and interaction can take place for example through workshops and other fora or consultations of ECSA members.

LandSense had its kick-off meeting on the 27^th and 28^th of September 2016 at IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, LandSense coordinator) in Laxenburg, close to Vienna, Austria. There, ECSA facilitated a breakout group on user requirements and demo case action plans, which allowed gathering some of the first inputs to support ECSA´s main contribution to the project.

ECSA will keep updating on LandSense developments relevant for the ECSA community. You can also visit LandSense’s website here, where you can subscribe to the LandSense mailing list, or follow LandSense on Twitter. LandSense project officer at ECSA: André Mascarenhas.

This project is funded as an innovation action from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 funding program under grant agreement number 689812.