# Environmental Factors Affecting Where People Geocache
## 1 Introduction  
Physical activity is considered an important public health priority to ensure overall health as well as life satisfaction. Leisure time through outdoor activities is also important for families and provides them with opportunities to bond, problem solve, and strengthen relationships [1]. Outdoor family recreation has also been found to help maintain and increase family cohesiveness [2]. Yet not everyone may have the same opportunities to participate in outdoor leisure activities because of various environmental factors, such as access to parks, poor weather at certain times in the year, and neighborhood crime. Given this, we set out to answer the research question: What environmental factors affect where people participate in outdoor activities? In particular, we were interested in the GPS-based treasure hunt, Geocaching, which continues to grow in size and now has more than 6 million players worldwide. Geocaching is a location-based treasure hunt game where players hide physical containers for other players to find using GPS coordinates posted online. Each container holds a logbook and optional tradable items. After players hunt for a geocache or \"cache\", they record their activity online by posting logs of \"found\", \"did not find\", _etc._ along with textual messages for other geocachers that describe their experience [3, 4]. A number of studies have explored how and why people geocache. Motivations include making walks or hikes \"purposeful\", competing with friends, exploring nature, and participating in activities with family or friends [4]. Players hide geocaches for others as a way to bring people to unique places or places of meaning for the creator, or for the pure goal of creating a \"challenge\" for someone else [3]. These acts have created a community culture within the player base of geocaching where people reporton and help maintain the geocaches owned by others [3]. Studies have also shown that geocachers routinely hide and find geocaches in the areas they frequent, including near home, work, and in transit between the two [4]. We also know that people geocache while on vacation [3]. While valuable, what we do not know is if and how people are considering environmental factors when selecting where to geocache and how this might affect their participation. The environmental impacts on physical activity have been studied from a variety of perspectives with the goal of understanding the relationship between an individual's preferences, behavior, and the environment [5]. There are a number of associations between personal attributes and physical activity. People who are older, live in rural areas, have less education, and have lower income have all been associated with less physical activity [6]. A review of literature in this area [7] assessed results from 19 different studies to determine correlations between activity and both perceived and objective physical environmental variables. They found that close access to places for walking, running, _etc._ (_i.e._, parks and walking trails) were associated with more activity. Awareness of these opportunities as well as esthetically pleasing areas (friendly, scenic, attractive places) tended to increase activity. Weather seemed to have no impact, and most studies found no association with perceived neighborhood safety. This type of work inspired us to consider how environmental factors would impact participation in outdoor activities like geocaching. Geocaching represents an interesting exploratory case for outdoor activities since it can be performed in nearly any outdoor location and people can be highly selective in terms of where they participate; the widespread placement of geocaches makes this possible. To do this, we looked at two types of geocaching: hiding caches and searching for caches. We collected data on all the US and Canadian caches on OpenCaching.com available as of September 2013.