Managing Tracks and Field Data

Import and Rename if Necessary

Two major factors influence how easy it is to manage search tracks: having users name their track well, and keeping tracks separated by op period via folders.

Set a clear protocol for track names in your morning briefing, and put it in your IAP so searchers can read it as well as hear it. Have teams label their tracks with their team number for the day, followed by a letter for each team member. For example, an OP2 team of four searchers could be 201a, 201b, 201c, and 201d. This makes it easy to see that the track was from OP2 and team 01.

Tracks from GPS Devices

If you import tracks after downloading them from GPS devices, you can rename them as you import them. These also default to the lines and polygons folder on import, and you can use bulk ops to move them.

You can rename tracks as you import them.

Edit as many as you want before importing.

Tracks from CalTopo Mobile

Tracks recorded to the map via the CalTopo mobile app will automatically display on the map in a folder called “app tracks.” This folder is only for active tracks. When someone finishes their track, it moves over to the Lines and Polygons folder. If necessary, it is possible to rename a track in the app tracks folder while it is being recorded.

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Managing Track Data

Organization starts with folders. Folders are a great way to manage the visibility of map objects and to keep operational data or assignment data together.

Use a new folder for each op period set of tracks. Move the tracks to that folder as soon as you finish importing them, and don't wait until the next day or later.

Use additional folders to hold air ops tracks, and set these folders to NOT load on page load. Air tracks will obliterate the map, obscuring anything else, though it is still important to store them.

Additional folders are used to separate tracks from other resource types. Dog team tracks and OHV tracks are two examples of items you may want to keep in separate folders.

Create a folder for each op’s tracks, and use bulk ops to move the appropriate tracks to it. In the bulk ops box, sort the columns by clicking on the top of the column. Clearly labeled tracks make it easy to select the ones to move to a particular folder. Sorting by length will help group all the air ops tracks.

Selecting a folder to move map objects to after going to bulk ops and choosing objects from the list.

Use bulk ops to recolor all the tracks in one OP.

Tracks may come in displaying in many colors.

Setting tracks to one color per OP can help keep the map clean and organized.

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Cleaning Tracks

It’s almost inevitable that someone will start recording their track before getting on a helicopter, or drive home before remembering to finish the track. To keep the map free of clutter, you need to clean up these tracks. Cleaning tracks is simple in concept but can take a little practice.

Use the split tool to cleave the track into two lines, then delete the line you don’t need. Exactly how much of the track you want to keep and how much you want to get rid of will depend on the incident and what you find useful. Best practice is to clean up tracks that are not associated with actual searching, such as time spent in vehicle transport.

Cleaning tracks is a task that can be visually challenging. When you split a track, the two resultant lines have identical names and are the same color; it is not clear where one begins and one ends. Thus after splitting a track, change the color of one or both of the resultant lines, and rename the new lines. Always do this before you delete a track, so that you can make sure you are deleting the right one.

Here are some steps for cleaning tracks in images:

Here is an imported track in the lines and polygons folder. In this example the user wants to eliminate some portion of the track and combine the two remaining portions.

Here you see a portion of a single track that goes out and back (off the image).

Select a point on that track and click on it, then click “modify” to expand the menu.

Select “split” from the menu, which splits the line into two at that point. In order to see this, the example user selected one of the two sides, renamed it track 4-2, and switched the color to blue.

Next split the line again. Then we renamed the third line as track 4-3, and colored it yellow. Thus we can clearly see the beginning (blue), end (red), and yellow (middle) sections of the original line.

Now we can use the same menu to join the red and blue lines.

Then delete the yellow line.

Now there is one shortened line.

Why Clean Tracks?

Here is an example:

This track includes a significant portion of road outside of the search area. Vehicular travel is not part of the search.

The user should remove the part of the track that includes the road. To do this, the user first zoomed into the start of the search area and split the track twice, re-coloring and re-naming each of the splits.

The user added an X to the names of the tracks that became extraneous. They are yellow and blue here. There red is the track to be kept. Now the user can go to bulk ops and delete both extra tracks at once.

Now the map is cleaner.

While a single extra line along a short road like this might not be a big deal, when you have tracks from searchers that recorded their drive to the search area, or their flight into the backcountry, it becomes important to clean the tracks to keep a nice search map.

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Conclusion

You should now be able to import track data, organize that into relevant folders, and clean up tracks so that you only have the part relevant to your search. In the next chapter, we’ll look at strategies for handling search maps on a larger scale, without wreaking havoc on your collaborators!

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