Georeferencing Incidents from Locality Descriptions and its Applications: a Case Study from Yosemite National Park Search and Rescue
نویسندگان
چکیده
The Search and Rescue (SAR) of individuals who become lost, injured, or stranded in wilderness presents a unique and worthwhile spatiotemporal challenge to investigate. Once incidents are georeferenced they can be spatially queried and analyzed. However, one major challenge for evaluating SAR in a spatial context is the lack of explicitly spatial data (addresses or coordinates) for historic incidents; they must be georeferenced from textual descriptions. This study implemented two established approaches for georeferencing incidents, the ‘Point-Radius’ and ‘Shape’ methods. Incorporating uncertainty measurements into a spatial database allows for more appropriate analyses of spatial dependence and the spatial distribution of incidents. From 2005–2010, 1,271 of 1,356 Yosemite Search and Rescue YOSAR incidents (93.7%) could be georeferenced using the Point-Radius Method, with a mean uncertainty radius = 560 51 m and mean uncertainty area of 3.60 0.840 km. However, when the Shape Method was applied to six case Address for correspondence: Qinghua Guo, School of Engineering, Sierra Nevada Research Institute, University of California-Merced, Merced, CA 95343, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Transactions in GIS, 2011, 15(6): 775–793 © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9671.2011.01290.x studies by considering the reference object shape, the uncertainty areas were reduced considerably (by up to 99.5% of the uncertain area generated by the Point-Radius Method). This is the first spatially-explicit study of SAR incidents and yields valuable insights into the role of georeferenced data in emergency preparedness.
منابع مشابه
Dead men walking: search and rescue in US National Parks.
OBJECTIVE To identify search and rescue (SAR) trends in US National Park Service (NPS) units. METHODS A retrospective review of the US National Park Service Annual Search and Rescue Reports from 1992 to 2007 and the SAR statistics for all NPS units in 2005. RESULTS From 1992 to 2007 there were 78,488 individuals involved in 65,439 SAR incidents. These incidents ended with 2659 fatalities, 2...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Trans. GIS
دوره 15 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011