Pedagogical Considerations for Mapping Perceptions of Safety in Parks

• In Event: Developing and Implementing High Impact Practices: Student and Instructor Perspectives

Abstract

This project focuses on a study of the perceptions of safety for park and campsite visitors. As an interdisciplinary team of students and professor we are analyzing 6 public parks and 2 State Parks (for camping) in the West Florida area. This project builds off work that was completed last year using a similar survey methodology. Unique to the current work, is the addition of spatially-explicit approach to conducting the surveys. Map production efforts focus on digitizing aerial images, referred to as heads-up digitizing, to help create the map portion of the public perception survey. Along with the utilization of aerial imagery, we are also performing ground truthing to validate important features in the areas of interest. When making these maps we have considered two vantage points. The first is that the maps have to be easy to interpret for the respondents (those being surveyed). Also, it is important that the format of the resulting responses aid in the analysis (the researchers).

Authors

• Rachael Greller, University of West Florida

• Nathan L. McKinney, University of West Florida

• John D. Morgan, University of West Florida