Search and rescue (SAR) has always been at the heart of CalTopo. Read on to hear from CalTopo founder Matt Jacobs about exciting upcoming improvements that we have planned for SAR users.

CalTopo’s origins date back to one of my first searches in 2009, and the mapping difficulties I encountered on it. While both the product and the company have taken a winding path from then to now, search and rescue has always been a core focus and it’s been a privilege to see our tools help redefine the standard of care in SAR, from remote planning to live tracking.

Early on, I built the product around practices then common in the Northern California SAR community, primarily a set of forms developed in the late 90s by the Bay Area Search and Rescue Council (BASARC). A desire to produce paper copies of these forms – primarily the “SAR 104” assignment form and “SAR 135” clue report – drove the fields currently available on CalTopo’s assignment and clue objects.

While search management has evolved since then, these objects have remained largely unchanged within CalTopo. In general we’ve tried hard to ensure backwards compatibility with existing workflows, only breaking them when absolutely necessary. However 2025 is bringing some major changes to the app, and for better or worse, making that omelette is going to mean breaking a few eggs.

One of the big changes I’ve noticed in SAR since the introduction of our mobile app is the tightening of information sharing and decision making loops: assignments are drawn on the fly for field redeployments, photos of clues are sent back for instant evaluation, and teams are debriefed on a screen without waiting for a printed map of their downloaded tracks. While I’m not ready to fully disclose our forthcoming changes, one major theme is to continue this trajectory of faster decision cycles by moving closer to a paperless search.

As one example, we’d like to allow teams to capture debriefing information directly within a map. Adding debriefs, and in particular allowing them to be linked to specific assignments, would stretch our single-level folder UI even further than it already is. But adding nested folder support atop a foundation where an assignment’s visibility is determined by not only its folder but also its operational period, is trickier than it might initially sound. While being mindful of the need to visually group assignments by OP, the only way we can reasonably get you nested folders is by making an object’s visibility depend only on its parent folder.

As another example, most of an assignment’s fields are only visible during editing. Update-only users – the permission level we recommend for most searchers – cannot edit these objects, and currently must get this data from paper documentation. Adding object details dialogs alongside our current edit dialogs would solve this problem, and that is just one of several tasks that would be made easier if all objects, including assignments, had a single title field instead of the current dual number/letter fields.

What this means for SAR objects is that over the next few months, we plan to make the following changes:

• Assignments will have a color property, as with standard lines and polygons. Assignments will initially display in this color, although users can still choose to color by operational period.
• Assignment number and letter will be consolidated into a single title property, as with our other object types.
• Visibility will no longer cascade from operational periods to assignments, or from assignments to clues. That is, unchecking an operational period in the left bar will not hide its assignments.
• When you click on an assignment, the “print individual map” and “print SAR 104” options will no longer appear; they will remain available in bulk ops for a period of time but will eventually be removed.
• The “child objects” dialog for operational periods and assignments will be removed. You could previously get at this dialog by clicking on an operational period in the left bar, or by clicking on an assignment on the map, then “Deprecated SAR Options”.
• Assignment-linked tracks and waypoints will be fully deprecated. These were an obscure feature unknown to most users that allowed you to link lines and markers to specific assignments. While already-saved objects will remain visible, they will no longer inherit color and visibility from their parent assignment, and you will not be able to add new ones.

The following changes are also planned, but will likely take place later, and only once we feel that new functionality is in place to help ease the transition:

• Modification of the properties available on assignments and clues. For example, the responsive, unresponsive and clue PODs will likely be consolidated into a single property.
• Removal of some paper-based workflow tasks, such as individual assignment maps, “104 (Assignment)” forms and “SAR 135” clue forms.
• Removal of the ability to color assignments by operational period, status and other attributes via the “display settings” control within the assignments folder.

I’m incredibly proud of the impact we’ve had since SARTopo’s launch in 2013, and look forward to many future years as an independent, mission-driven organization unencumbered from the needs of a larger corporate parent. I realize these changes will be disruptive to some of our users with established workflows, but they are necessary to support some really exciting work going on behind the scenes. And since we’re already peeling back that curtain a bit, yes, that does include allowing you to see which team member created an object.

Matt Jacobs

Founder, CalTopo