Environmental impact analysis of national youth mountainbike races

Supervisor

Assoc Prof Dr Hermann Klug (hermann.klug@plus.ac.at)

Short description

The Austria Youngsters Cup defines the national mountainbike race series for youth in Austria. Competitions take place at twelve different locations across Austria in the age categories between under 13 (U13) and under 17 (U17) years. This requires athletes travelling to each competition. Due to the many equipment to be carried, this usually happens with a car. Under the flexible hypothesis that each rider travels with a minivan (VW, Mercedes) consuming 8 litres of Diesel per 100 km travel, many litres of fuel and respective CO₂ emissions take place. Based on the final athlete ranking sheet from 2021 and the known living locations of athletes, this MSc thesis should quantify the number of kilometres and respective fuel spend for each athlete. From these indicators, the environmental impact related to CO₂ emissions should be estimated. Based on the BSc thesis of Laura Greil, the student objective is 1) to use existing geodata such as the race locations, 2) to enable an on demand online calculation tool, where athletes can enter their address to calculate the hours of driving. The latter should be based on the fastest Google route. Thirdly, the number of kilometres to be driven, 4) the litres of fossil fuels expected, and 5) the amount of expected costs in relation EUR and 6) the CO₂ emissions consumed should be calculated.

Data: Excel sheet of athletes and their living locations. Race locations.

Hypothesis: Individual CO₂ and monetary costs in EUR can be estimated with personal entries like fossil fuel used, litres consumed, cost per litre, and the travel distance taken from a web service!

Research question: What is the overall/individual environmental impact of the Austria Youngsters Cup resulting from travelling?

Objective: To quantify the amount of fuel spend, costs in EUR occurred and CO₂ emitted per family and as a total sum for the whole Austria Youngsters Cup riders.

References

No particular reference to be distributed.

Prerequisites/qualification

Interest in biking and solid skills GIS, programming and working with tables and databases.

Planned Start

Any time