[QGIS-Developer] Search and Rescue Package

[John Hutcheson]

Many thanks to Richard Dulvenvoorde for helping me connect with the Developer community.


Greetings from Michigan!
I work on a search and rescue team that wishes to move to QGIS for use in printing maps, deploying teams to search segments of the search area, and tracking clues / search assets. I have already used the system (3.2) as it is today and find it to be far superior to what we have used in the past. In preparation for this, we have obtained sat maps and topos of the lower peninsula of Michigan (our coverage area) and will shortly obtain street maps covering the same area to develop the appropriate layers for our maps.  

After a short search of the available packages for the system, I don’t see any that match our needs, though I’ve just been using the search terms I am familiar with, and being a newbie, could have easily missed something. I don’t expect what we need will have much application or be of interest to others, so I won’t be surprised if we need to start from scratch.  What I would like is some ideas of existing packages I can steal shamelessly from to build what we need.  Or if it already exists, a push to the right package(s) or the right user group that may already cover this turf.  

I see you have all the tools we will need for our maps (except perhaps grid convergence), which should make this relatively easy. I don’t see any packages that are scripted to walk through the process we currently use to define search areas using R. Koester’s behavioral category rings. And so I am committed to developing a script todo this in our first phase of development.

Our plan is to develop a script that will:
 Define the IPP (initial Planning Point) for the search and mark the map accordingly
 Mark other search assets (Staging / Incident Command / Net Control, etc)
 Constrain the visible / map area to the 95th percentile of Probability of Area (or Containment).
 Place Koester rings on the map for the 25 / 50 / 75 / 95 POAs and for our 300m initial search area.
 Index all maps with magnetic declination and grid convergence for our navigator's easy reference
 Save PDF versions of the SAT/TOPO/Street maps to a remote folder for retrieval as the search progresses.
At various scales and indexed for retrieval by area / scale

If this works as I hope, we will begin planning work on a second phase to use automation to segment the search area into acceptable chunks a ground team or canine team can tackle in a given working period.  

Any help is appreciated.  

Have fun,
John Hutcheson
Midland County Search and Rescue
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