Trail Triage: Identifying Collaborative Workflows in Trail Management Assisted by Crowdsourced Reports

Trail management is a complex, distributed endeavor that requires coordination among conservancies, government agencies, and local trail clubs to ensure visitor safety, environmental stewardship, and the protection of historical resources. Despite its importance, there has been limited systematic research on understanding or supporting the collaborative workflows that sustain this work. To help bridge this gap, we conducted interviews with 10 trail managers involved in or familiar with field operations across five major U.S. long-distance trails. A thematic analysis of the transcripts reveals that trail management spans a wide array of responsibilities, including volunteer coordination, resource allocation, hazard sense-making, and on-the-ground fieldwork. We identify institutional inefficiencies that surface during four distinct stages of the temporal collaborative sense-making process as managers interpret and act upon hiker-submitted reports of trail hazards. We conclude by outlining design implications for field reporting and decision-support systems that better align with the realities of volunteer-based, resource-constrained trail organizations, supporting more timely and coordinated action across distributed stakeholders.