Scaling up Nature Conservation: A Field Study With Crowdsourcing Invasive Species Detection and Removal

: Laato, Samuli; Kordyaka, Bastian; Yoshida, Hironori; Nummenmaa, Timo

: Achilleos, Achilleas; Forti, Stefano; Papadopoulos, George Angelos; Pappas, Ilias

: IFIP Conference on e-Business, eServices, and e-Society

Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH

: 2025

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

: Pervasive Digital Services for People’s Well-Being, Inclusion and Sustainable Development : 24th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 2025, Limassol, Cyprus, September 9–11, 2025, Proceedings

: 16079

: 332

: 346

: 978-3-032-06163-8

: 978-3-032-06164-5

: 0302-9743

: 1611-3349

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06164-5_24

: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06164-5_24

Cities and municipalities often rely on contractors for upkeeping infrastructure and public spaces. In this paper, we investigate a novel crowdsourcing approach as an alternative. As a case study, we look at invasive plant detection and removal from public spaces with an app called Crowdsorsa, a gamified location-based crowdsourcing platform. Through a field study in northern Europe, we demonstrate that Crowdsorsa reaches multiple critically important goals: (1) it is a cost-effective solution for cities to handle certain maintenance tasks; (2) it provides citizens an opportunity to gain work experience; (3) it provides workers a low-threshold way to earn additional income; (4) it engages citizens to care for public spaces; and (5) it teaches workers about the environment they live in; among others. With these promising findings, we encourage more research into the use of crowdsourcing for increasingly many tasks in cities and municipalities. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

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This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland’s Flagship Programme UNITE (decision 357907) and the Research Council of Finland-funded GamiLiDAR project (decision 359472).