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Short Abstract

This study introduces an approach for profiling the contributors of agri-food citizen science projects. The methodology relied only on the contributions’ characteristics. 766 contributors from a crowdsourcing application in viticulture were analyzed.

Abstract

To monitor the dynamics of grapevine water stress at the regional level, Apex-Vigne, a free smartphone application, has been offered to wine and viticulture professionals for over five years. This application has enabled the collection of 28,546 observations, with over 766 contributors for nearly 11,320 farm plots monitored in France. It constitutes a unique crowdsourced dataset in agriculture and confirms the value of citizen science for monitoring complex phenomena at large-scale (e.g., drought, pests).

The main challenge in this type of project is to identify, within the large volume of collected data, the observations that accurately describe the phenomenon of interest. One classical approach is to assign a confidence score to each observation based on the profile of the contributor. In the Apex-Vigne project, contributors are supposed to be farmers, seasonal workers, advisors, or researchers with different motivations and expertise. However, the exact profiles of these contributors and their respective proportions remain unknown. The objective of this paper is to propose an automatic approach to profile contributors, considering only the characteristics of their contributions.

Contributor profiling was performed using hierarchical clustering based on 6 descriptors, like the number of contributions, the number of plots, and years of app use. Cluster characteristics were validated through a user survey.

Four profiles were identified, aligning with a priori knowledge and survey results. This foundation could support future work on assigning confidence scores to contributions, thereby facilitating the characterisation of data quality in agri-food citizen science projects.