Ordinary Citizens helping in Combatting Deforestation of Tropical Forests

Abstract

Open Science is an emergent area promoting free and easy access to both publications and data, which also encourages new forms of knowledge production. In this context, ordinary citizens can collect, analyze and classify data necessary to solve technical and scientific problems, which is known as Citizen Science. This also emerging subject can generate a large amount of data with good quality, creating a close connection between scientists and the general public, which increases the engagement and awareness in solving society's challenges, such as the deforestation of tropical forests. ForestEyes is a Citizen Science project that aims to use volunteer contributions to create a training set to an intelligent system that will recognize deforestation in new areas of tropical forests. This project received more than 86,000 contributions from 644 volunteers, and the intelligent system built from these data achieved more than 80% average accuracy, showing ForestEyes' potential to become an auxiliary product in deforestation monitoring.