ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PHONE-BASED GPS FOR CAPTURING HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIKING TRAILS

Abstract

Smartphone‑based Global Positioning System (GPS) applications are widely used to record hiking and recreational activities, yet their effectiveness for capturing fine‑scale geometric properties of trails remains uncertain. In particular, while horizontal (planar) positional accuracy of consumer‑grade GPS has been extensively studied, vertical accuracy and its consequences for derived metrics such as elevation gain and trail length are less well understood. This study evaluates the horizontal and vertical consistency of six smartphone GPS tracks recorded simultaneously by hikers walking as a group along the same route on Miklavški Hill (Celje, Slovenia), using OpenStreetMap (OSM) trail geometry as a practical reference. Track alignment is assessed using a buffer‑based method following Hunter and Goodchild, and point‑to‑line distances are used to characterize positional uncertainty along the trail. We further examine how these uncertainties propagate into commonly used derived measures, including total trail length, elevation gain, and measures of path complexity. Results indicate that phone‑based GPS is sufficiently accurate for comparative and descriptive trail analysis, but not reliable for fine‑scale geometric characterization below several meters, particularly in the vertical dimension. These findings highlight important limitations for quantitative analyses of hiking trail geometry based on consumer GPS data.