An emerging solution to the ‘scale gap’ is to call on the capabilities of community (citizens and non-professionals) to ‘augment’ centralized remote sensing systems. Centralized systems will remain critical to our knowledge base, but community remote sensing (CRS) may be the only means to bridge our environmental knowledge from global to local scales. Work similar to CRS has been done in the related areas of citizen science, citizen mapping, e-science, and more. But CRS itself is new, with new techniques and skills that differ from those of such related community-based disciplines. It is not just citizens taking pictures – the community can participate through calibration, validation, analysis, and many other means that greatly enhance our centralized systems. Applied in conjunction with centralized systems, CRS can be a powerful tool for addressing environmental issues and responding to events such as natural disasters. IGARSS 2010 builds on the CRS theme, highlighting projects and perspectives in this area – see the CRS section of the IGARSS 2010 website for more.