Application of the Volunteered Geographic Information data to monitor traffic in the forest area

The purpose of this study was to present the possibilities of using available Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) created by the users of OpenStreetMap program and sports applications such as GPies.com or Endomondo to monitor the traffic in the forest area. In addition, areas where, due to high traffic, potential conflicts between different user groups may occur, were marked out. The research area covered two mountain forest districts located in the Sudetes Mountains: Szklarska Poręba and Świeradów, which due to their tourist values and an extensive network of hiking and cycling trails arouse society’s interest. In the area, 2896 unique activities divided into cycling, running and hiking were registered. It was shown that 7.3% of the length of routes used by pedestrians, 13.6% of the length of routes for runners and 11.0% of the length of routes for cyclists are characterized by high intensity of traffic, while 30.3%, 28.4% and 37.7% of routes for the indicated groups, respectively, are characterized by medium intensity of traffic. On other routes, low intensity of utilization was observed. Existing hiking and cycling trails were pointed out as the most frequently used routes. The specially designed bicycle routes, the so−called ‘Single track’, located in the Świeradów Forest District, were popular among the users. The highest traffic occurred in the morning and afternoon, on weekends and in the summer months. According to the adopted assumptions, there is a high risk of conflicts between runners and cyclists at about 1.5% of the route length as well as 2.1% of the length of routes used simultaneously by pedestrians and cyclists. It should be stated that VGI data can be used to monitor traffic in forest areas and constitute one of the elements of the decision support system (DSS). A certain weakness of VGI data from the sports applications used in this study could be the lack of the possibility of creating user profiles. Consequently that causes lack of more detailed data on this subject (age, sex, etc.). The limitation in the data useage is the privacy policy, which allows downloading only such data that has been made available for public use in the application resources