Augmented citizen science for environmental monitoring and education

Abstract

Environmental monitoring and ecological studies detect and visualize changes of the environment over time. Some agencies are committed to document the development of conservation and status of geotopes and geosites, which is time-consuming and costintensive. Citizen science and crowd sourcing are modern approaches to collect data and at the same time to raise user awareness for environmental changes. Citizen scientists can take photographs of point of interests (POI) with smartphones and the PAN App, which is presented in this article. The user is navigated to a specific point and is then guided with an augmented reality approach to take a photo in a specific direction. The collected photographs are processed to time-lapse videos to visualize environmental changes. Users and experts in environmental agencies can use this data for long-term documentation.