ABSTRACT
The term ‘volunteered geographic information’ (VGI), first suggested by Goodchild (2007), refers to the gathering and dissemination of geographic information provided voluntarily by the public, using emerging Web 2.0 technologies along with cyberinfrastructure and crowdsourcing methods (Elwood, 2008; Elwood et al., 2012; Sui et al., 2013). Increasingly, the general public contributes this georeferenced information using their web-enabled devices. This includes contributions through their participation in social media or citizen science initiatives (Pimm et al., 2015; Wood et al., 2015). Equally important is information collected from non-expert audiences that have specific place-based knowledge, using digital mapping tools and targeted methods that may be administered in-person or remotely (Corbett and Rambaldi, 2009; Taylor and Lauriault, 2014).
