MOUNTAIN TRACKS CAPTURING

D. Petrovic

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, Slovenia

dusan.petrovic@fgg.uni-lj.si

Marked mountain tracks are the very important part of infrastructure in hilly and mountain areas, and consequently one of the obligatory content of topographic and also tourist maps of such areas. Their presentations on the maps have been traditionally serving for a general orientation on the terrain and as a guide for route planning. The exact positional presentations on the maps have been a great problem but, since they are marked on the terrain, such displacements only in extreme and rare situation caused any remarkable problems. Nowadays, marked mountain tracks on the maps or as a content of vector digital topographical databases serve for many other purposes: direct track-following using GPS or other navigation service, exact locating in a case of accident, rescue and searching actions, registration of land own, and database for maintenance of tracks. These ways of usage would need more reliable and positional correct data. But on the other hand methods that can improve positional accuracy of mountain tracks are limited and more reliable ones are very expensive. Remote sensing interpretation is limited in forest areas, where tracks are often not visible. Terrain measurements are time-consuming and consequently expensive, but still depended of the conditions. Finally, people that continuously maintain the tracks, so called “track-markers” are often adult ones and with limited computer knowledge. Their description of tracks is usually available only in scratches or in written form. To overcome this problem we checked several possible sources to capture the best possible marked mountain tracks data for tertiary of Slovenia. The part of the project overlapped with a project of Mountain Association of Slovenia that would lead to establishment of marked mountain tracks database for entire Slovenia.