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News From the Field

Predicting the uphill battle


April 3, 2019

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For wildland firefighters retreating from the fire to a safety zone, predicting how long it takes to move across terrain can be a matter of life and death. Geographers developed a series of models that strongly predict how terrain slope impacts travel rates. Using a crowdsourced fitness-tracking database, they analyzed GPS data from nearly 30,000 people. The resulting models are the first to account for variability in travel rates between slow, medium and fast movers. Full Story

Source
University of Utah

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