Monitoring progress on our way to successfully achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is key to their achievement, but there are significant data gaps that make this crucial exercise difficult. A new IIASA-led study explored the use of a citizen science tool known as Picture Pile to see how it could contribute to SDG monitoring.
The 17 goals, 169 targets, and 231 indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by UN member states are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice. Monitoring our progress as we work towards their achievement, will be key to their success, but official statistics alone will not be capable of producing information on the scale needed to measure progress and populate the SDG indicator framework, which suffers from significant data gaps. To fill this gap, new approaches to data collection and production are needed. Gathering the needed data through citizen science tools and approaches is one way to complement and enhance official statistics.

Citizen science can contribute to the monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals.
•Picture Pile is a citizen science tool for rapid image classification.
•Picture Pile could contribute to the monitoring of 15 SDG indicators.
•To realize this potential, use cases for PP and the SDGs need to be developed.

The SDGs are a universal agenda to address the world’s most pressing societal, environmental and economic challenges. The supply of timely, relevant and reliable data is essential in guiding policies and decisions for successful implementation of the SDGs. Yet official statistics cannot provide all of the data needed to populate the SDG indicator framework. Citizen science offers a novel solution and an untapped opportunity to complement traditional sources of data, such as household surveys, for monitoring progress towards the SDGs, while at the same time mobilizing action and raising awareness for their achievement. This paper presents the potential offered by one specific citizen science tool, Picture Pile, to complement and enhance official statistics to monitor several SDGs and targets. Designed to be a generic and flexible tool, Picture Pile is a web-based and mobile application for ingesting imagery from satellites, orthophotos, unmanned aerial vehicles or geotagged photographs that can then be rapidly classified by volunteers. The results show that Picture Pile could contribute to the monitoring of fifteen SDG indicators under goals 1, 2, 11, 13, 14 and 15 based on the Picture Pile campaigns undertaken to date.

Past research undertaken on using citizen science data in SDG monitoring has mainly focused on its potential to bridge data gaps in information needed by countries, international organizations, and data- and statistics communities for informed policymaking. In their study, published in Environmental Science and Policy, the authors therefore aimed to highlight how individual citizen science tools can more concretely contribute to SDG processes. The study specifically looked at the use of a mobile and web application called Picture Pile to see how it could contribute to SDG monitoring and where its potential lies in the SDG framework.

Picture Pile is a web-based and mobile application designed for rapid image classification from, among others, satellite images, geo-tagged photographs, and drone imagery. The initial idea behind the application was to provide large amounts of reference data needed for the training and validation of remotely sensed map products such as land cover maps and maps of deforestation. The images are assembled into a pile and provided to the Picture Pile application for classification by volunteers. The sorting works by showing users an image and then asking them a question like “Do you see damaged buildings?”, which the player answers by swiping the image to the right to indicate “yes” or left for “no”. If the answer is not clear, there is also an option to swipe the image down to reply “maybe”.


List of authors: Fraisl, D., See, L., Sturn, T., MacFeely, S., Bowser, A., Campbell, J., Moorthy, I., Danylo, O., McCallum, I., Fritz, S