History Main / GPSEvidence

** The most famous instance being Creator/ShiaLaBeouf's ''Series/HeWillNotDivideUs'' livestream, in which he raised a flag in protest leading to the most elaborate game of "Capture the Flag" known to man. At one point he attempted to hide it by filming the flag from below with nothing but the sky in view, but 4chan trolls managed to locate the flag in under two days by using astronomy, time zones, and detective work with airline flight paths. When he moved it to a deserted cabin, they found it by examining the wood pattern on the walls. The final location was in front of a blank white wall, which they tracked down to a house in London within four hours by examining how a light from off-screen shifted and eventually dimmed.

* When Anonymous wanted to disrupt Shia [=LeBeouf=]'s art projects, they tracked them down with incredible speed and accuracy. For example, one flag was located in the middle of a field somewhere in America. So Anon checked social media for posts mentioning Shia's location. Determined the time zone from the sunset in the video stream. Heard the noise of a road, and frogs, so it was near a road and body of water. Analysed flight patterns. The road noise continues into the evening? Probably near a highway. So someone went out near the projected area and played car horn noises until they got a fix, and found a flagpole on Google Maps. And they found the camera via star position. Many people expressed admiration and/or fear at the level of effort Anon put into pranking [=LeBeouf=].

* GeoGuessr puts the player in the position of deducing their location only from a 360 degree Google streetview shot. Skilled players say they can identify locations based on foliage and soil color.

* ''Series/{{Columbo}}'', more than once. Columbo once figured out a killer had been in the area of a murder because [[Recap/ColumboS10E03 mulberries had fallen inside the killer's luxury car's hood]]. In [[Recap/ColumboS10E10 another episode]] a pivotal piece of evidence turned out to be a dead mouse--specifically, the mouse was found in a Los Angeles restaurant but it turned out to be a breed native to the mountains of Southern California but not the city.

* Season 2 of ''Series/TheWire'' revolves around the case of the dead women in a shipping container. While [=McNulty=] uses his detective skills -- and the help of tide charts and a mining engineer -- to prove the deaths happened within the juristiction of the Baltimore Police Department, it's less to do with solving the case than to spite his old boss. The investigation into the girls shows they come from Eastern Europe, and many of them recieved breast implants at the same clinic in Budapest, Hungary, but ultimately the leads go cold and despite his efforts, [=McNulty=] fails at his attempt to put find the name of the first girl he pulled out the water.

* Season 2 of ''Series/TheWire'' revolves around the case of the dead women in a shipping container. While initially McNulty uses his detective skills -- and the help of tide charts and a mining engineer -- to prove the deaths happened within the juristiction of the Baltimore Police Department to spite his old boss, he uses a large part of the rest of the season using any clue left in the container to put names to faces, and manages to track down one of them based on locations mentioned in a letter.

** In "Just Us Justice Ducks, Part 1", Darkwing deduces the location of Negaduck's hideout from a single bread crumb left at the crime scene -- [[FailedASpotCheck completely failing to notice]] [[FunnyBackgroundEvent the building in the background currently raising a giant flag with Negaduck's face on it]]. As the page quote says, Negaduck planted the crumb there on purpose because he knew Darkwing wouldn't notice the flag.

* Used a couple of times in ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure'' part 3. First, the actual adventure is kicked off when Star Platinum spots an insect native to Egypt in Joseph's psychic photo of Dio. Once in the country, the group acquires a photo of Dio's mansion and asks around to find its location, attracting the attention of one of Dio's henchmen who later admits to their destination being in lower Cairo.

* According to Wiki/TheOtherWiki, during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII sand used in the ballast of Japanese fire balloons was used to determine not only that they were not launched from within the United States, but also which Japanese beaches the sand was taken from.

* ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' has done this, placing a suspect at the scene of a crime because they found silica dioxide and calcium oxide in his shoes. Basically, they found sand and lime, one incredibly, and one reasonably, common substance, and arrested him on that. It helped that they already suspected him, and there was a glass-making company next door to the crime scene, however.
** And once they placed someone at a crime scene by testing the plant DNA of the burrs found on his shoes.
** There was the time Abby tracks Reynosa's movements by tracking bug bites on her dead smuggler's skin... In a matter of hours...

* ''Series/MyLifeIsMurder'': In "Feet of Clay", Alexa identifies the killer, and then is able to provide the evidence the police need because of dirt and life litter trapped in the killer's shoes that could only have been picked up at the murder.

* In ''Film/PineappleExpress'', [[TheHero Dale]] sees [[BigBad drug lord Ted]] kill a man and go on the run, leaving behind a roach of marihuana at the scene. This roach is full of a very rare kind of marihuana named "[[TitleDrop Pineapple Express]]", only sold by Ted, and who sold it to only one dealer in the entire valley -- Saul, Dale's friend. Half an hour later, Dale ''and'' Saul barely escape with their lives when Ted's goons come kicking down the door.

** It helps in that case that they already had a small number of possible marinas to gather samples from and compare the evidence to. It was Dexter's bad luck that he kept weighing bodies down using rocks from the marina where he keeps his boat.

* Done several times on ''Series/{{CSI}}'' and its respective spinoffs:

* In ''Film/PineappleExpress'', [[TheHero Dale]] sees [[BigBad drug lord Ted]] kill a man and goes on the run, leaving behind a roach of marihuana at the scene. This roach is full of a very rare kind of marihuana named "[[TitleDrop Pineapple Express]]", only sold by Ted, and who sold it to only one dealer in the entire valley -- Saul, Dale's friend. Half an hour later, Dale ''and'' Saul barely escape with their lives when Ted's goons come kicking down the door.

** ''Series/TheDefenders2017'': [[Series/IronFist2017 Danny Rand]] and ComicBook/ColleenWing, trying to find leads on the Hand, face a setback when Elektra kills a man they have been tracking for months. The man says with his dying breath that the war with the Hand is in New York City. On returning to Manhattan, they determine that the sword the dead man was carrying must have been to an exclusive sword shop that is only located in Manhattan. They travel there and encounter Hand henchmen destroying bodies with acid, and Danny's attempt to rough up Cole for answers leads to him encountering Series/LukeCage2016.

* In ''Film/AceVenturaWhenNatureCalls'', Ace gets shot by multiple darts and suspects the darts are being shot by the Wachootoo tribe. After the scene with the tribe, he gets shot again and finds out the Wachootoo dart didn't match the original darts. Ace discovers original dart was carved from a "red, fungus-bearing acala" which is grown only in one area in the jungle where the bat-nappers are hiding.

* In ''Film/FastAndFurious'', Dom looks at the crash scene where [[spoiler:Letty (allegedly) died]], and finds ash of a peculiar color which he recognizes as coming from a meth-nitro afterburner system. That part is fairly plausible, since as a former champion street racer, he would know a lot about exotic car modifications. But from that clue, he then immediately figures out exactly what garage the person responsible for the crash went to. This despite the fact that 1: The idea that there is literally only one mechanic willing to do a particular car mod in a region as heavily populated as the LA Metro area is ridiculous, and 2: Since Dom hadn't been to LA in five years, even if it had been true when he last lived there, there was a good chance it wasn't true now. It still works.

* In ''Film/JackTheRipper1976'', the pine needle found clutched in the dead woman's hand comes from a Indian species; the only examples of which in London are in Kensington Gardens. This tallies with the scent the blind man Mr. Bridger had smelled on Jack.

* In ''Film/{{Room}}'', a cop is dealing with Jack, a traumatized boy who has just escaped his kidnapper and now has lost his way in an totally alien environment. While Jack is completely disoriented and convinced he has lost his one chance to help his mother, the cop is able to get from him a handful of vital clues: the trip he had in the kidnapper's truck made three stops, and he and his mother were held in a shack with a skylight. The cop concludes that Jack's mother must likely be in a three block vicinity in a small building with a distinctive and easy to spot roof feature. With that information, the police are able to rescue Ma that night.

* Not uncommon in Creator/EllisPeters' ''Literature/BrotherCadfael'' novels. In ''The Leper of St. Giles'', Cadfael discovers traces of three different varieties of plants on a corpse, and surmises that the body was murdered in an area where all three plants grow closely together.

** In ''Literature/{{Thud}}'', Angua smells clay from Quarry Lane, the home of a large part of the Ankh-Morpork troll community down in the dwarf mine. She however remember's Vimes philosophy on clues: "Don't trust them, you could walk around with pockets full of them." It '''is''' a really important clue for that reason, because it tells them a dwarf is trying to frame the trolls.
** In ''Literature/TheFifthElephant'', Reg Shoe remembers Vimes' advice as well when investigating the murder of rubber goods manufacturer Sonky. One must beware of trusting clues too much, otherwise one might find a wooden leg, a pink slipper and a feather and "hatch up a theory involving a one-legged ballet dancer and a production of ''Chicken Lake''".

** PlayedWith in ''Literature/{{Night Watch|Discworld}}'', where Vimes is shown to be able to tell where in the city he is by feeling the brickwork on the road through thin-soled boots, since he spent decades patrolling the city while wearing cardboard-soled boots.

* Deliberately done by the Eco-Killer in ''The Killing Hour'' - he kidnaps two women, one he murders and dumps in an easy-to-find spot and the other he abandons alive in a deadly, remote place. He leaves clues to the living woman's location on the body of the dead woman, as a challenge to see if the detectives can track her down before she dies. These clues are always GPSEvidence, but even so they often fail to save the second victim.

* ''{{Series/Arrow}}'' just ''loves'' this trope. Apparently it's super popular between villains in Starling/Star City to hide in abandoned factories that used to be dedicated to manufacture an exclusive chemical formula that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

** And of course the ''Series/{{CSI}}'' season five finale, "Grave Danger," when Grissom, Entomologist Extraordinaire, determines Nick's location from the ants in his box, since fire ants can only be found in wet fertile soil, which in the Nevada desert means plant nurseries; combining it with the known radius of how far Nick could have gone and the fact the kidnapper's relatives own one, they're able to pin down the spot to send the search and rescue.

*** When Jessica realizes that Kilgrave has someone taking pictures of her, she initially tries to go to various spots around the city where these pictures have been taken, in order to pinpoint the photographer's position. While on another job, she sees an NYPD surveillance camera and realizes that maybe one of those cameras caught the spy. So she contacts Will Simpson, and gives him times and dates from various cameras she's passed, so she can look and see if any faces show up following her in any of them.

*** Early in season 2, after an encounter with the fake "Dr. Leslie Hansen" (actually [[spoiler:Jessica's mom]]), Jessica realizes that the imposter was wearing a wig made of real human hair. Trish notes it's a pretty high quality wig as she didn't catch it, and says there are only three wig shops in New York City that make wigs of that quality. The first one they hit (owned by a woman who made wigs for Trish during her ''It's Patsy'' days) recognizes the woman.

** In "Mr. Monk and the Three Pies", Adrian's brother Ambrose points out that of course Pat van Ranken's old pickup truck runs, and that it's been to a certain section of the park, because it has yellow acorns in the truckbed that only grow in one spot in the park. Impressive knowledge of the local ecology, for a guy who '''never''' leaves his house.

* ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' has done this, placing a suspect at the scene of a crime because they found silica dioxide and calcium oxide in his shoes. Basically, they found sand and lime, one incredibly, and one reasonably, common substance, and arrested him on that. It helped that they already suspected him, and there was a glass making company next door to the crime scene, however.

** Played with in "The Blind Banker", where Sherlock meets an acquaintance from the university and tell him that he knows he has recently flew around the world twice. The guy asks if it was some sort of stain from tea that only comes from India. Sherlock calmly replies that he spoke with the guy's secretary. After the meeting, John confronts him about it, as he was there and didn't see Sherlock speaking with the secretary. Sherlock admits that he just wanted to put the guy down and really got the clue from the guy's watch which is two days off.
* On ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' Dr. Bashir's Film/JamesBond holodeck program invokes this trope. He sees a ruby and is able to narrow its origin down to a small geographic area based on what shade of red it is (the redness is directly proportunate to the concentration of chromium ions).

** Featured in one case when it's necessary to locate a kidnapped spirit medium. The medium channels a spirit who takes note of the surroundings, and is then channeled by another medium to relay the information. Averted in that the clues are vague and not especially useful.

** In another episode, Batman is able to figure out where Robin's kidnappers have taken him based on the photo of him they left behind as evidence of their action. He recognizes the unique knife type and rope making technique to a very specific area of the world. [[spoiler:Justified as this is a test of skill fabricated by Ra's Al Ghul to evaluate Batman's detective abilities.]]

* Done a few times on ''WesternAnimation/WhereOnEarthIsCarmenSandiego'' (the 1990s cartoon). In these cases, they had a bit more credibility, as the clues were often intentional hints left by Carmen for the detectives, and were usually significant enough culturally or historically to be useful: for instance, the idea that komodo dragons are found on only one island in Indonesia.

* Commonly used for investigating bombings or hit-and-runs. Explosives, plastics and paint have unique markers that let forensic teams figure where they probably came from, even from incredibly small samples. The same goes with the red dye packs used to track bank robbers.

* The cast of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_(murder_victim) "Adam", a boy whose headless torso was found in the Thames.]] Forensics was able to determine that he was from Nigeria from the contents of his stomach, but never found the killer.
* One general example that really is quite specific is isotope analysis. By taking a person's hair samples, it is possible to determine where they have been recently based on the water they have been drinking. The obvious solution to beating this is to only drink bottled water, or shave your head. [[RevealingCoverup Though either of those would be somewhat suspicious in and of itself in most cases.]]

* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/TotallySpies'' a villain is tracked down by an unusual shoe print at a crime scene that matches a rare shoe that only three people in the world own.

* ''Series/StrangerThings'': ** One of the plot hooks in Season 3 is a strange communication in Russian that Dustin's radio picked up. Steve realises that the call must have been sent from Hawkins, rather than to it, because the music in the background is the same as that played by the kid's amusement facilities in the mall.

* ''Series/{{Columbo}}'', more than once. Columbo once figured out a killer had been in the area of a murder because [[Recap/ColumboS10E03 mulberries had fallen inside the killer's luxury car's hood]]. In [[Recap/ColumboS10E10 another episode]] a pivotal piece of evidence turned out to be a dead mouse--specifically, the mouse was found in a Los Angeles restuarant but it turned out to be a breed native to the mountains of Southern California but not the city.

* ''Series/JakeAndTheFatman'': In "Rhapsody in Blue", Jake gets sticky sap stuck to the roof of his car when he visits the murder scene. Later, while talking the garage attendant, the attendant sympathizes and says that he had to clean that sap off the car of one of the suspects twice within 24 hours. Jake realises that the suspect had returned to the scene of the crime after the legitimate visit he had told the police about.