parks
Coastal Eco Explorer: Your Interactive Digital Pocket Guide to Park Wildlife by Avery Owen Imagine hiking a trail at your favorite state park, surrounded by stunning landscapes, plants and animals that you wish that you could learn more about. Now, imagine that there is a free and easy-touse tool that can provide this information alongside educational videos about the species and habitats you see before you. This is Coastal Eco Explorer (CEE): a mobile application that provides visitors of Carolina Beach State Park and Fort Fisher State Recreation Area a digital pocket guide to ecosystems, flora and fauna native to Southeastern North Carolina. Available any time and anywhere, CEE extends the accessibility of the park and allows users to experience a self-guided tour
Ecosystem modules provide users with videos featuring a park ranger and options to explore the flora and fauna that call that ecosystem home.
in person or from home. As the first of its kind in any state park, CEE accommodates the digital era while delivering engaging outdoor content. The app’s inspiration was seeded by an island ecology course offered at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) instructed by two of the app’s creators: Dr. Amy Taylor and Dr. Dennis Kubasko of UNCW’s Watson College of Education. The course guides students through field-based explorations of local ecology and history. Students use these experiences to develop web-based K–12 integrated lesson plans featuring flora and fauna. Using these as the foundation for the content, Drs. Taylor and Kubasko teamed with Dr. Lucas Layman of the UNCW Department of Computer Science, graduate student Kinsley Sigmund and undergraduate student Avery Owen to create the mobile app.
The Coastal Eco Explorer’s interactive map can display the user’s location in relation to nearby features and ecosystems.
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“We saw a need for a mobile companion in the Carolina Beach State Park,” said Dr. Kubasko, “something that supported the visual observations of park guests and guided them to explore deeper. With the help of our island ecology students, we further refined existing content local to the park for the purpose of education and exploration.”
Dr. Kubasko, Dr. Taylor and Ms. Owen collaborated with NC State Park Rangers to select the flora, fauna and ecosystems to be featured in the app. The app’s prototype featured three ecosystems and eighteen species. As of February 2022 the educational content included eleven ecosystems and forty-five species from Carolina Beach State Park and Fort Fisher State Recreation Area. Educational content, no matter how engaging, must be accessible in a userfriendly app design. Dr. Lucas Layman and Ms. Sigmund worked to create and sustain the Coastal Eco Explorer’s mobile application as a unique platform delivering locally relevant ecology content to users. CEE’s launch screen invites users to browse a complete list of park ecosystems and to explore the park using the platform’s interactive map. Upon selecting the map, users can view their current location, park trails and locations of featured sites. Dr. Layman symbolized five types of notable features—flora, fauna, ecosystems, structures and featured sites—with differing visual pins on the map. Ecosystems appear as purple regions on the map encompassing their corresponding areas. If granted access to a device’s location, the app detects when the user enters an ecosystem and (continued on page 20
Cape Fear’s Going Green • Spring 2022
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