Flood Citizen Observatory: a crowdsourcing-based approach for flood risk management in Brazil.

The number and intensity of floods have increased worldwide due to climate change, causing more damage, deaths and economic impacts than any other natural disaster. Coping with this type of disaster requires up-to-date, complete and accurate information about the current state of environmental variables. To make a contribution in this context, this paper proposes a crowdsourcing-based approach for obtaining useful volunteer information for the context of flood risk management. Furthermore, an experimental evaluation was performed in order to verify the effectiveness of this approach. KeywordsFlood Risk Management; Volunteered Geographic Information; VGI; Crowdsourcing; Citizen Observatory