Towards initiating OpenLandMap founded on citizens’ science: The current status of land use features of OpenStreetMap in Europe

Abstract

Land use inventories are important information sources for scholarly research, policy-makers, practitioners, and developers. A considerable amount of effort and monetary resources have been used to generate global/regional/local land use datasets. While remote sensing images and techniques as well as field surveying have been the main sources of determining land use features, in-field measurements of ground truth data collection for attributing those features has been always a challenging step in terms of time, money, as well as information reliability. In recent years, Web 2.0 technologies and GPS-enabled devices have advanced citizen science (CS) projects and made them user-friendly for volunteered citizens to collect and share their knowledge about geographical objects to these projects. Surprisingly, one of the leading CS projects i.e., OpenStreetMap (OSM) collects and provides land use features. The collaboratively collected land use features from multiple citizens could greatly support the challenging component of land use mapping which is in-field data collection. Hence, the main objective of this study is to calculate the completeness of land use features to OSM across Europe. The empirical findings reveal that the completeness index varies widely ranging from almost 2% for Iceland to 96% for Bosnia and Herzegovina. More precisely, more than 50% of land use features of eight European countries are mapped. This shows that CS can play a role in land use mapping as an alternative data source, which can partially contribute to the existing inventories for updating purposes.