Using digital mapping, geographic information science, and environmental analysis to understand patterns of violence, territorial control, and difficult search environments - including rivers and remote landscapes.

Around the world, people disappear in waterways, such as estuaries, mangroves, or rivers. Landscapes also change, including by the construction of dams and environmental transformation, complicating search efforts. Although limited research has been conducted in some places, scientific knowledge about how bodies move in these environments remains very limited. Working with data and analysts from UBPD, The Search Lab uses satellite imagery and Geographic Information Science to establish baseline knowledge to help guide search efforts, as well as to identify, for example, related locations such as where a recovered body may have entered a water system.

_{Photo Courtesy of UBPD}