Vertical fractal dimension of hiking trails in hilly terrain through the lens of citizen science

Project client: ARIS Public Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Research and Innovation

Time frame: 1. 7. 2024 – 30. 6. 2026

Project coordinator: UM Faculty of logistics

Participating organizations: Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, USA

Brief summary of the project:

Linkages between scientists and the public are critical for building broad support for science and for science-informed social debate and policy-making. Citizen science is research conducted with involvement and partnership from the general public, typically through the collection of data bycitizens for specific scientific projects and through the communication of findings by scientists to the public. Within Geography, the term volunteeredgeographic information has been defined to characterize spatial information collected by citizen scientists for scientific work.This proposal offers both basic and applied science components through a citizen-science lens to strengthen research ties between University ofMaribor (UM) and Michigan State University (MSU). It builds on an existing collaboration between Faculty of Logistics (UM) and the Department ofGeography, Environment and Spatial Sciences (MSU).Prior work by Prah and Shortridge investigated the vertical fractal dimension of roads (Prah and Shortridge 2023), using a range of experiments instudy regions across Slovenia. Fractal dimension is a property of smoothness, or lack thereof, for features like rivers, coastlines, and roads across arange of spatial scales. Features that are similarly “rough” at fine spatial scales as they are at coarse spatial scales are said to have higher fractaldimensionality. They possess interesting and important characteristics: for example, the length of a linear fractal feature is longer (even infinitelylong) when measured at finer scales.