CS4SEHAG

Conventional methods for monitoring alpine geosystems are either spatially or temporally limited. Although airborne laserscanning or aerial images provide area wide highly accurate 3D information, due to associated costs they can only be acquired once every few years. While measurement stations have high temporal resolution, they are static and only represent their close surrounding. Terrestrial laserscanning, drones or classical fieldwork require expertise knowledge and can only be carried out within limited selected time periods. Hence, even if multiple systems and approaches are combined a gap in the observation of these environments, both spatially and temporally, is present. This information gap prevents us from increasing our understanding of the ongoing changes in these geosystems On the other hand, citizens have unique local knowledge of these environments, regularly spend time there and care about their condition and preservation. Combined with the wide availability of smartphones, which allow everyone to document their surroundings without additional costs at high spatial and temporal resolution, we believe that citizen science can play a fundamental role in closing the gap in monitoring alpine geosystems. Hence, in the course of the project we will develop a web app which will allow citizens to document their observations of ongoing changes in selected alpine environments through images. Those images will be further semi-automatically processed in order to use them subsequently in spatial analysis. However, we will not only concentrate on data acquisition: To foster long-term participation and provide participants with a unique user experience, we will implement and evaluate various forms of visualizations, combined with gaming elements and augmented reality.

Within CS4SEHAG, we investigated how citizens can be integrated into the documentation of climate-driven changes in alpine regions. Our premise was that citizen science could bridge the observation gaps left by conventional methods such as aerial images, laser scanning, and measurement stations. CS4SEHAG directly extended the FWF-funded SEHAG project, which investigated the sensitivity of high-alpine regions to climate change through analysis of changes in geomorphology, hydrology and vegetation. To enable direct contributions, we developed the citizen science app myALPICS. The app allows interested citizens to capture images of their surroundings during leisure time in the Alps. To drive (initial) engagement, we estimated the position and orientation of over 100 historical terrestrial images, integrating them into the app as "before/after" animations. To promote the project, we organized public events in Martelltal and Kaunertal and myALPICS was featured in magazines such as Bergauf and bergundsteigen. The project was also presented at two scientific conferences: The IALE 2025 European Landscape Ecology Congress in Bratislava and at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2026 in Leoben. Throughout the project, we received significant positive feedback, demonstrating high public interest. The historical images within the myALPICS app proved to be exceptionally powerful tools for communicating environmental change, sparking numerous "Wow" moments during public events and beyond. However, the project also revealed the challenges of citizen science: Converting high engagement into active data contributions (such as user-uploaded images) proved more challenging than anticipated. We observed that word-of-mouth promotion was insufficient to reach widespread usage, and developing a custom app that ensures a seamless user experience - particularly in offline alpine environments - presented significant technical hurdles. Consequently, while our initial goal of closing the observation gap was not fully realized, CS4SEHAG successfully demonstrated that terrestrial imagery is a powerful medium for communicating environmental change to the public. Ultimately, CS4SEHAG provided vital insights for the design and implementation of future citizen science initiatives.