Entry Name: UNCHARTED

VAST Challenge 2017
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:

Thomas Kapler, tkapler@uncharted.software
Thanh Pham, tpham@uncharted.software

Student Team: NO

Tools Used:

ESRI ArcMap: to format and geo register the data in a realistic scale for GeoTime

GeoTime: For all analysis

Approximately how many hours were spent working on this submission in total?

5 days

May we post your submission in the Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository after VAST Challenge 2017 is complete?

YES

Video

Video is included in the submission folder

Questions

1 – “Patterns of Life” analyses depend on recognizing repeating patterns of activities by individuals or groups. Describe up to six daily patterns of life by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, if I drove to a coffee house every morning, but did not stay for long, you might hypothesize I’m getting coffee “to-go”). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

ANSWERS

A) Typical Camping Visits last from a day to a week. Some stay for the weekend and some for the week. Some enter and exit at the same entrance, and others stay for a period and then continue their journey out through a different exit. Some visitors visit multiple locations. (These patterns were observed by performing searches in GeoTime based on durations of tracks or the number of events in the track.
It was clear to see that the data set was created by duplicating a limited number of path variants, and then making temporal translation and a few ad-hoc adjustments)

B) Camping Traffic at entrances

It may be useful to understand visitor traffic (vs commercial) activity at entrances in order to schedule staffing and support. Here is profile of traffic in and out at entrances by hour of day by month, not including large trucks and buses. Not surprisingly traffic peaks in July from 6 am to 6 pm. (The GeoTime activity matrix was used to display selected categories of events in a heatmap grid with variable axes)

C) Suspicious Nighttime shipping across the Park.

There is an ongoing pattern of 4+-Axle trucks that traverse the park through restricted gates and ranger-stop-6 to a destination at remotely-located ranger-stop-3 (RS3) in the middle of the night 2-6 am Tuesdays and Thursdays. In no cases do they meet or intersect other ranger vehicles. These trucks follow the same route, stop at ranger-stop-3 for 10-15 minutes - perhaps to drop-off or pick-up a shipment - and then re-trace their route back to the same entrance. Only other park rangers visit this location. Could this be a smuggling operation or simply a regular night-time supply drop-off or pickup? The pattern is most frequent (~weekly) during the busiest time of the year (Jun-Aug). (This pattern was visually identified in the data during exploration of the data)

D) There is reason to believe that the above pattern is actually a garbage pickup, which would explain its remote location. Looking at Ranger activity through RS3, 15884 out of a total 23877 ranger events are connected to a route that goes through RS3. 593 out of 998 ranger tracks go through RS3. Many of these include routes that run a circuit around the park, indicating that they might be picking up garbage prior to visiting RS3.

The image below shows a typical long ranger route through the park. The events highlighted in pink occur before visiting RS3 (outlined in blue). The yellow dots are events recorded after the RS3 visit, ultimately ending at the ranger base at about 5pm. All ranger vehicle routes begin and end at the ranger base. Presumably they would be collecting garbage on the way to the RS3 and then dump it off.

E) Park Ranger Speeding

Rangers speed quite frequently and consistently throughout the year, going over 40 MPH in the route segments shown below. The Geotime “Speed finder” function was used to identify segments with inferred speed above 40 MPH

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2 – Patterns of Life analyses may also depend on understanding what patterns appear over longer periods of time (in this case, over multiple days). Describe up to six patterns of life that occur over multiple days (including across the entire data set) by vehicles traveling through and within the park. Characterize the patterns by describing the kinds of vehicles participating, their spatial activities (where do they go?), their temporal activities (when does the pattern happen?), and provide a hypothesis of what the pattern represents (for example, many vehicles showing up at the same location each Saturday at the same time may suggest some activity occurring there each Saturday). Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

ANSWER

A) Bus Traffic

All buses cross the park without stopping, suggesting that there are no bus tours around the parks with stops. Buses typically drive the speed limit, though there are 103 cases where they drive over 40 mph between Entrance 0 and General Gate 1. Bus traffic runs through the park 24 hrs consistently, and peaks in the summer, then slows to a trickle during Dec and Jan.

B) Northern Route congestion

The park should consider opening up the Gate5-Ranger-stp-6-Gate 6 route, to visitors and commercial traffic in order to reduce bus traffic along the northern route and reduce the time buses need to spend traversing the park, causing pollution and noise.

C) Winter Camping

Not surprisingly, camping in winter is quite infrequent. Only 63 overnight stays in winter were discovered between Nov 1 and May 1. Of those, the most popular sites are camps 4,5,8 and 0. Knowing which campsites are likely to be occupied in winter is critical in case of extreme whether and potential rescue operations.

D) Ranger activity patterns

Ranger vehicle traffic remains surprisingly consistent throughout the year despite the above demographics. It may be wise to adjust services to match demand, and reduce unnecessary traffic in the winter. Note there is no ranger activity between 4 and 6 am. (Ranger events were isolated and then displayed in the Geotime activity matrix)

The least frequently visited location by Ranger vehicles is General Gate 0 with only 2 visits during the whole year, even though 214 other vehicle events occur there. (Discovered by isolating ranger events and observing location with least traffic, and then listing all other events for that location)

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3 – Unusual patterns may be patterns of activity that changes from an established pattern, or are just difficult to explain from what you know of a situation. Describe up to six unusual patterns (either single day or multiple days) and highlight why you find them unusual. Please limit your answer to six images and 500 words.

ANSWER

A) Speeding or Racing seems to occur between 2 public cars or motorcycles On Jun 20. They enter the park together and move closely together, reaching a top speed of ~100mph before leaving together 18 minutes later. (Geotime Speed finder was used to search for inferred speed between events)

B) Possible equipment movement within the park

There are 3 instances of vehicles that transit between 2 locations on weekends for several weeks. Hypothesis is that some kind of work or event requiring special equipment is required during working hours or on weekends at some specific sites. However the vehicles are 2 cars and a 2-axle-truck, not park vehicles. These may simply be visitors that stay at the same camp each week or weekend for several weeks in a row. (These patterns were visually observed through data exploration, and by searching for track temporal duration)

C) Extended stay visitor in the park for a year and going…!

The visitor below stays for 349-days without leaving the park. They entered but never left via an entrance and might still be in the park! They move around the park almost monthly, but their travel time of day is not unusual to indicate evasion, and it is a regular non-ranger car/motorcycle. Either someone else is supplying them with food or they are trapping and eating the park wildlife! (Pattern discovered using track duration search)

Two other tracks (20155517055510-758 and 20154625114655-96) have stays in the park for over 30 days over Jul and Aug 2015, but they stay at the same sites and do not move around.

4 –– What are the top 3 patterns you discovered that you suspect could be most impactful to bird life in the nature preserve? (Short text answer)

ANSWER

4.1) Traffic noise is known to push birds away to quieter areas. The busiest Gates are along the northern route thru Ranger Stop 2. A third of all traffic passes through this route (59575/171477 events).

4.2) This may push the birds into quieter areas – possibly into Ranger-only route segments that rangers are known to speed in (see section 1E) which would increase likelihood of vehicle-bird collisions.

4.3) Concentration of East-West traffic through a few routes, including the north squeezepoint thru RS2 may impact migratory routes? Evenly distributing traffic and allowing shorter travel times through the park by opening up allowing commercial traffic through Gate 5 and 6 could help.