Geographical centers of administrative-territorial entities of the Rivne region of Ukraine: essence, significance and peculiarities of definition

The geographical centers of territories belong to the category of important geographical constants and are traditionally perceived as single and unambiguous points. The purpose of this work is to determine the coordinates of the geographical centers of the new administrative-territorial entities of the Rivne region of Ukraine in order to establish special information and memorial signs that will have cognitive, unifying, educational, tourist and local history significance. Methodology – geographical centers were determined in the Pulkovo-1942 and WGS-84 coordinate systems based on the results of vectorisation of the boundaries of territories at a scale of 1:10,000 as centers of gravity of the respective figures (Digitals and AutoCad software products were used). As a result of the work performed, it was found that this methodology allows obtaining a sufficiently high accuracy of the results (7.1 m), in contrast to the use of publicly available and convenient resources (OpenStreetMap, QGIS). The novelty of the study is that the geographical centers of the amalgamated territorial communities and administrative districts of Rivne region are identified for the first time and the proposed approach can be implemented for similar studies of other territories with a possible prospect of a new type of tourism – geocentric.