Community remote sensing (CRS),a new approach to the application of remote sensing,is a human-based remote sensing technique. With activities of volunteers, this technique can compensate effectively for the disadvantage of traditional monitoring equipment of remote sensing. Based on abundant literatures of related topics,the authors described the status of the development of CRS that emerged in recent years,and discussed its potential for geoscience applications in such aspects as primary research contents,adopted techniques,application field and future prospect. The research indicates that, although the application of CRS has just started and is met with many problems,the carried-out-projects and applying practices have fully proved its great potential. In recent years,CRS has achieved important progress especially in such fields as ecosystem monitoring and disaster response. Its geoscience application, however, is relatively limited,showing a great space of developing in the future. CRS,as an emerging field of geoscience applications,might affect the future decadal development of new approaches to geosciences applications and hence deserves much attention.