Entry Name: "UKON-Birds and Recreation-MC1"

VAST Challenge 2017
Mini-Challenge 1

Team Members:

Juri Buchmüller, University of Konstanz, Germany, juri.buchmueller@uni-konstanz.de PRIMARY
Wolfgang Jentner, University of Konstanz, Germany, wolfgang.jentner@uni-konstanz.de
Dirk Streeb, University of Konstanz, Germany, dirk.streeb@uni-konstanz.de

Student Team: No

Tools Used:

Dirk Streebs Visual Movement Explorer
Custom Java tool with neo4j graph database

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

80

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

Video

https://youtu.be/il1qtCqf_0M

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.

1. Day Tourists
See figure above: Day Tourists are a common group of visitors. They arrive in the park in the morning, stop at a camp ground and leave the same day. The image shows visitors as columns where colors represent the last type of gate the passed as assigned on the given park map. Columns are ordered by the time of the day on their arrival. In the left part you can see that the first Day Tourists arrive earlier than overnight tourists do. Additionally, they stay longer in the park the earlier they arrive (see right part without overnight tourists). In the night, no vehicles stop and just transit the preserver.

2. See figure above: Overnight Tourists are another large group. They do not arrive at night or in the early morning. Some of the 2- and 3-axle trucks appear to be caravans. Usually they do not change campgrounds and stay for several nights.

3. Daily Ranger Patrol Patterns
See figure above: Rangers patrol the preserve and ranger stops on a daily basis. We identified 7 common route patterns for their patrols using automated sequential pattern mining. The rest of the ranger trips consists of trips to single dedicated places like campgrounds or entrances and back. The rangers use these patrol routes throughout the whole year with no noticeable seasonal changes, thus we consider these routes daily patterns.

4. General Daily Traffic
See figure above: Average daily traffic patterns can be distinguished fairly easily: Due to overnight campers, a steady population of vehicles is present at all times, with slight increases during daytime with day tourists. Heavy truck traffic is transit based and goes in during night and day. The same applies to bus traffic. A small peak in the early morning hours for large buses lets us assume that we see transiting long-haul traffic. Ranger business hours are obvious from the graph, showing active ranger trips between 6 in the morning until 2 in the morning.

5. Transit patterns
See figure above: These 10 transit patterns can be found in the data and make around 45% (8050 trips) excluding rangers. All of the transit patterns go from one of the entrances to the other. The trips are sorted by their frequency (descending order). There are some patterns in the data where cars enter and leave the park at the same entrance (see 3.1. Dumping truck) or what we call “lost drivers” driving into the park and turning around. Additionally, two “exceptional” trips can be found which belong to pattern 3 (top row) and occur because the data ends on May 31^st 2016.

6. Camping preferences
See table above: The above table shows that most of the park-tourists only visit one camping place with one trip. While CP5 is clearly the winner, CP1 lacks of tourists which might be due to the fact that it’s located off the main routes or that it is simply not as appealing as the other camping places. Some of the tourists visit two but only one guy visits 6 camping places in one (very long) trip (see 3.5).

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.

Seasonal Changes (see figure above):

For motorcycles, cars and two- and three axle trucks, which we suspect also include smaller and larger motorhomes, a clear seasonal pattern is visible: Season starts in May with 970 unique visitors and ramps up to 3882 unique visitors in July. End of season is on October with around 750 unique visitors, and in late fall and during winter time, the reserve gets less than 200 visitors a month by individual traffic, slowly picking up in February again. Seasonal patterns are also visible for trucks and buses, but their season is longer, and less of them pass the park. Ranger operations are not affected by season, and around 80 trips are performed each month.

See figure above: Season changes are very prominent in visitor recordings. In summer there is more daily traffic and especially overnight stays are frequent. In the image, again, visitors are represented as columns, this time ordered by when they entered the park over the year from May 15 to May 16. Stays peak at the weekend of the 4th of July (see highlighted part of image) and the weekend after (with the event at the ranger-stop). In winter (darker part to the right) there are almost no overnight stays and traffic in general is reduced.

Temporal Patterns (see figure above):
Average trip length increases during the season from about half-day-trips in spring to an average of one and a half days in peak season, sharply dropping with beginning of October, where probably the campgrounds close. Few outliers during winter time suggest wild camping or maintenance staff. Non-individual traffic and freight trucks almost never stop and stay on average around 45 minutes, suggesting transit traffic only.

Spatial Patterns (see Fig. above):
There are three main traffic patterns: Transit traffic, Day Tourists, and camping tourists. The figure above shows the distribution of all traffic and for each type of vehicle (except rangers) on each road segment scaled by amount of trips going through each segment. Transit roads between the exits can be identified easily, with the roads between general gate 5,1,7 and entrance 1 being the busiest. For the car types, it is obvious, that trucks and buses do not stop at camping sites.

Speed Patterns (see fig. above):
Large trucks and buses seem to tend to slightly exceed the speed limit (color) more than other vehicles, especially around entrance 0, between general gate 1 and entrance 3, and for small buses from general gate 7 to entrance 1. We assume every car takes the shortest route.

Coincident visitors (see figure above)
Due to overnight stays, the amount of individual traveler vehicles (2axles cars, 2- and 3-axle trucks) in the park at the same time is around 70 in spring, ramping up to over 400 the day after July 4^th, easing in fall down to less than 100 and less than 20 in winter time. Far less freight trucks and buses are counted at any time, since these are transits not spending time in the park.

Ranger Operations (see figure above):
Rangers are patrolling all year without notable seasonal changes. There are between one and six ranger trips per day (2.5 on average), and the rangers spend between 15 minutes and ten hours on the road, staying at stops for up to 1.5 hours. The rangers visit campgrounds less than ranger stops. In the vicinity of their base, it seems the rangers are likely to drive a bit faster than elsewhere, maybe eager to start or to call it a day. Also, they drive pretty fast around ranger stop 3. The business hours are from six in the morning to midnight, sometimes until 1am or 2am in the morning. There is no ranger service between 3 and 5 in the morning. Rangers keep well to the speed limits. There are a few days where they barely stop at checkpoints.

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.

1. Dumping Truck
See figure above: By filtering for violations (non-ranger cars driving to ranger stops) we can find 23 trips of a four-axle truck driving from entrance 3 to ranger stop 3 through two restricted zones (between gate 5 and 6 and at gate 3), stopping at rs3 for 10-15 minutes, then returning. The top three barcharts show that this truck is only driving at night (2am-5am) when there are no rangers on duty, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and almost every month, except in April. As this truck is violating property and performing these trips at night, we suspect that this truck is doing something illegal in the park, perhaps illegal waste dumping.

2. Cars in restricted area to ranger-stop1
See figure above: On 2015-07-10, six cars drive directly to ranger-stop 1 (not allowed). They have a high speed on the segment from the gate to the ranger-stop. The cars all arrive at the entrance around the same time (~10:30am) and leave the park in the afternoon at different times. We suspect that this was an invitation from a ranger to have a get-together at this place, since initially, one ranger is there as well.

3. Car Race
See figure above: Filtering for speed we can identify two cars driving over 50 mp/h* in parts of their trips. Both car trips start at the exact same seconds at entrance 4. We suppose this is an illegal race through the park. The car that has a max speed of 72mp/h does not win. The other car with a max speed of 54mp/h reaches entrance 2 two seconds earlier.

4. Slow day:
See figure above: On 2015-12-11, only one two-axle car is present that drives very slowly from entrance1 to camping 3, stays 6 minutes and then heads slowly back.

5. UUUUUUULTRA-Long-Term-Camper
See figure above: One 2-axle-car enters the park at 2015-06-05 and does not leave it until the data ends. We suspect the guy(s) live in this park for the whole period. Above figure shows that they alter the camping places and are staying there for about a month every time, except for camping place 1, where they only spend 12 hours. Also it seems they are avoiding the eastern part of the preserve.

6. Looking at 4-axle-trucks we can see that on several occasions these trucks wait multiple hours at some point in the park (and thus, their overall trip length is increased as well). Typically, there is only normal transit traffic through the park from this type of vehicle. Filtering for these long trips shows 6 distinct trips that have no common spatial pattern. However, all of these trucks arrive after 6pm at an entrance and wait over night until after 6:45am when they continue their journey through the park, probably having slept.

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)

The most impactful pattern surely are the regular truck trips through two restricted zones in the middle of the night when rangers are off-duty. Obviously, the drivers try to avoid getting caught doing what they are doing, and since it is the rangers job to protect the environment, the dirty deeds of the trucks surely are harmful to the preserve. Park Rangers should check and pursue violations regularly.

Second, we observe that a lot of transit traffic has to take a long way from entrance1 and entrance3 to entrance4 and entrance2 and vice versa. This creates larger volumes of traffic on the north/south-roads, probably stressing the environment with noise and pollution. One solution could be to open the closed road between gate 5 and 6, if the area protected could cope with the traffic.

Third, during summer time the visitor impact could be strenuous to bird life, especially in July. Pipit breeding season is from April to June, and the species spends most of their time on the ground. Thus, loads of tourists could have a special impact on the bird and its young. Countermeasures could include limiting the amount of vehicles per class in the park or increasing entrance fees.