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The emergence of geocaching

Introduction

In this project the dynamics of geocaching are investigated by exploring statistics and visualisations. Geocaching is a global treasure-hunt activity in which participants hide and seek containers using GPS technology. Wikipedia characterises the activity as follows:

    " Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook and "treasure," usually toys or trinkets of little value. "
    Source: Wikipedia

Even though the activity is concentrated in Western countries, there are over 800,000 geocaches placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. These impressive figures raise the question how geocaching grew to what it is today. Issues that will be addressed are: How many caches are hidden and found per period and how does this progresses over time? Is geocaching still getting popular, or is popularity declining. How do countries with high activity compare? How do travel bugs, items that can be moved from cache to cache, travel and what distances do they make?

The emergence of geocaching

One of the many aspect that can be looked at is the geographical distribution of caches that are hidden. To get insight into the geographical distribution, a dataset has been compiled that contains for each of the almost 400,000 active caches hidden by May 2007 the geographical coordinates. When these caches are plot on a world map, we get the following illustration:

On this heat map, the color indicates the density of caches from low density (blue) via green and yellow to high density (red).

To get an idea of the emergence of geocaches (and geocaching) worldwide, a time lapse movie was created that shows for each moment of time the geographical distribution of geocaches. The movie starts in May 2001, when GPS tallite navigation signals became accessibly to civilians and geocaching started, and runs until May 2007: 

[Animated GIF, 1000x500 pixels, 24MB]
In this time laps movie, new caches appearing until a certain growth rate are marked white. In the movie we can see that geocaching is predominant in the United States (and Australia) and later becomes popular in Western Europe as well.

When we zoom in on Europe, we can see the following geographical distribution on May 2007:

We can see here that geocaching is popular in the UK and Middle/Western Europe, roughly Germany and neighbouring. South European and East European countries show rather low geocaching activity.

When we create a similar time laps movie for Europe exclusively, we can better spot national differences in geocaching activity over time: 

[Animated GIF, 800x744 pixels, 39MB]
The movie shows that early geocaching activity concentrated in Germany, the Belenux, and the United Kingdom, and quickly get picked up in southern urban Scandinavia. The low activity in southern and Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe could be explained by the nature of geocaching. Keeping in mind that the activity is mediated by internet for the publication of coordinates and cache descriptions, it is not suprising to see that geocaching activity seems to be correlated with internet penetration, which is considerably higher in Western Europe and Scandinavia than in the other parts.