Mountainbike trails in and around Salzburg

Supervisor

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

Short description

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the mountainbike sport is booming. Based on individual preferences, people like doing a round tour on asphalt or gravel roads, they are enjoying a two hour cross country ride or are keen on down hilling for instance Gaisberg mountain close to Salzburg. Despite the forest law from 1975 forbids usual ways for mountainbiking, people still do it on forest roads or hiking trails. These are shared on many social platforms such as Strava Metro, GPS-Tour, Zwift, Garmin Connect, Bergfex, MTB Project, Singletrails, Tourfinder, Outdooractive, Komot, Bikemap, Trailforks, Facebook groups or indicate trails on Open Cycle Map or Open Street Map. The idea of this work should be a synthesis of information from different platforms and visualising the different tracks within a one stop shop. This one stop shop should be a dashboard with an open source and online open-access mapping interface like leaflet. Having collected and mapped all trails, hot spot areas should be defined in heat maps based on the number of trails mapped in the portals. The more people share a particular trail, the hotter the spot. Sometimes, the uploaded tracks contain the date and the hour when the ride took place. A comparison across the tracks should reveal, in which date of the year and at which time of a day is the highest frequency of use. From all gathered datasets, also the minimum, maximum and average length (in km) and duration (in minutes) of a tour could be derived. Research question behind this study is who, where, when, how often rides a particular area in the surrounding of Salzburg based on all available tracks stored in the before mentioned sources. Partly, platforms provide access to the Application Programming Interface (API) and thus trail segments could be automatically harvested. This is true for Strava datasets, as underpinned by the doogal website.

References & datasets

The region of interest is about 25 km surrounding the city centre of Salzburg. Datasets to be used are coming from open sources like open street/cycle map and the trails from the different portals mentioned.

Materials and methods

Bevor mentioned resources.

Prerequisites/qualification

Interest in biking, solid skills WebGIS setup, web programming

Planned Start

Any time