SilvaCarbon: Volunteered Geographical Information and Effective Monitoring

Significant amounts of efforts have been taken into monitoring forest and terrestrial carbon by many countries in recent years. As the rapid increase of methodologies and resources, international collaboration is critical now for enhancing capacity of managing and sharing the ongoing research efficiently worldwide. Moreover, much broader citizen participants with or without expert training have been involved in. Fortunately, the emergence of Web2.0, social networking, and geopositioning technology make such wide-range collaboration and participation on geospatial science research possible. The concept of Volunteer Geographical Information (VGI) coined by Michael F. Goodchild enables the ability to contribute georeferenced and disseminated scientific resource and to exchange information over the web. With this in mind, SilvaCarbon, applying the above technologies, is a project conducted by U.S. federal agencies as a U.S. contribution to the Forest Carbon Tracking task of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observation. Clearly, all research activities must rely on geographic data. And because of the observational objectives of Forest Carbon Tracking task, data sharing is a main objective of the project needed to be addressed. Data can be captured directly, contributed by secondary sources, or obtained from historical archive for the past period. Each VGI participant becomes a sensor with the ability to collect and share data. A given phenomenon can be always described more sufficient by data from multiple sources than captured individually. And data sharing can also satisfy the desire to avoid data duplication. Another purpose of Silvacarbon is to describe the activity states of involved countries, communities and individual participants and to help communicating. With the assistant of the other social networking like Facebook and Twitter, VGI participants are given an access to broadcast states of their research or activities. They also can plan travels and trades, and administer events and actions according to the returned information. More importantly, the quality of VGI needs to be taken into account. Participant can obtain the most current information and data resources shared in time. Furthermore, with the capacity of map mash-up technology, SilvaCarbon can allow participants to map their data and research result, and to track activity location and movements. Participants can share information by the georeferenced representation on map. A web portal prototype has been developed as the implement of VGI concept for SilvaCarbon according to the project objectives, and a group of users have been invited to test the functions.