Monitoring land cover change in an Environmental Impact Assessment follow-up processes: A low-cost replicable method using remote sensing imagery and citizen science.

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) has become an essential requirement for project development and has grown even more with increased environmental awareness worldwide. The purpose of EIA is to ensure the potential environmental impacts are addressed and mitigation efforts are in place at the pre-decision stage of a project; it also aims to provide information on the consequences of the development to ensure the implementation criteria are met at the post-decision stage. EIA follow-up is the last phase of the process in an EIA to achieve the post-decision stage goal that was set during the EIA process. However, the follow-up process is rarely done in practice since it requires substantial resources in terms of money, time and expert for different stakeholders.

With the development of Earth Observation (EO) and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies, there is an opportunity to enhance data collection and processing in a more accessible and low-cost way to meet the needs of the EIA follow-up phase. With the development of the internet and mobile devices, Citizen Science (CS) is a valuable tool to collect ground truth data, commonly used to validate satellite imagery processing methods.

Land use and land cover (LULC) change is a significant environmental variable addressed in EIA and monitored by EO. This research developed and tested a feasible workflow to monitor and evaluate an environmental impact on LULC from two proposed EIA follow-up using freely accessible EO and GIS software, Google Earth Engine. Then a CS app was developed using ArcGIS Field Maps to collect ground truth data in a test area. The results showed it is a replicable workflow in terms of the availability of the open dataset and algorithms, the accuracy of the monitoring outcomes, availability of CS application, and quality of ground truth data collected by CS. It provides an achievable entry point regarding low-cost and low technical skills needed for related parties and raises public engagement to establish a better EIA follow-up monitoring network. Further efforts should focus on building a framework for implementing this monitoring process properly to different types of EIA cases in terms of land use categories.