AUTHORS: Di Yang, Chiung-Shiuan Fu, Michael Binford – Department of Geography, University of Florida
ABSTRACT: Citizen science opens a new era in mapping and visualizing the physical world by providing an open-access database of valuable georeferenced information collected by volunteer citizens. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused widespread devastation resulting in significant need of rapid mapping support in response to the destructive weather events. Citizens made great contributions to the real-time mapping of Hurricane Harvey flooded areas. As one of the most well known Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) initiatives, OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributes not only to road network distribution information but also to the potential for using these data to justify and delineate land patterns. In this study, mapping land-use pattern changes, we provide a novel and detailed regional land-use mapping strategy that incorporates OpenStreetMap with Earth observations. For Earth observation data-sets, we use Google Earth Engine (GEE) as GEE is a newly developed mapping and analysis platform that enables large-scale spatial analysis by its special infrastructure and automatic parallelized computation techniques. We use citizen science mapping in virtualizing Hurricane Harvey affected areas and examine them under the lens of landscape ecology analysis. We use our mapping strategy and results to not only further landscape ecology but to also bring researcher and citizen closer together.