Coastal Eco Explorer App

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-to-use 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 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.

Ecosystem modules provide users with videos featuring a park ranger and options to explore the flora and fauna that call that ecosystem home.

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.

“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.

The Coastal Eco Explorer’s interactive map can display the user’s location in relation to nearby features and ecosystems.

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 provides a notification directing the user to an information page about the flora and fauna of said ecosystem.

Content pages for featured ecological points of interest include taxonomy, descriptions, habitat information and conservation information. Simply by walking, tapping and swiping, app users can gain easy access to a broad knowledge about local wildlife.

“The Coastal Eco Explorer mobile application is an interdisciplinary success that demonstrates how computing can be a service to the Cape Fear community,” said Dr. Layman. “The engineering challenges in creating the app also created an excellent learning experience for students and faculty at UNCW.”

Since 2018, the NC State Park Rangers at Carolina Beach State Park and Fort Fisher State Recreation Area have been essential in the shaping of Coastal Eco Explorer. When the creators proposed adding videos featuring rangers sharing lessons about native ecosystems, Park Superintendents Chris Helms and Jeff Owen were glad to offer their expertise to the prototype.

A UNCW videography team filmed Mr. Helms and Mr. Owen on-site at more than ten ecosystems, including the pine savanna, salt marsh and lily pond. These ranger-guided tour videos were incorporated into the app’s ecosystem landing pages, now serving as a warm welcome for users entering specific habitats.

The videos are also available on the Coastal Eco Explorer website—an extension of the app’s resources. The website (uncw.edu/ed/coastalecoexplorer) houses app download links, trail video experiences and over one hundred educational web pages and lesson plans created by UNCW students and reviewed by faculty. These resources are designed to offer extra support to educators utilizing the app as a teaching tool.

Coastal Eco Explorer’s creators are excited about expanding the app’s scope to include more of the forty state parks and recreation areas across North Carolina. Continued collaboration with NC State Park Rangers will expand the reach of the app’s impact and encourage the use of the resource to enhance visitor experience. Future app expansions, including interactive games and quizzes, will contribute to the user experience.

Carolina Beach State Park Superintendent Chris Helms adds, “I’m very proud to be associated with the Coastal Eco Explorer mobile application. We’ve all seen technological advances in many facets of life, and now here’s the next-level approach to environmental education that our park visitors have been waiting for. The timing could not have been more perfect as the advent of pandemic meant more people in parks and outdoor spaces, but less in-person interactions with rangers or other educators. It is so satisfying to see literal years of effort by UNCW students and leaders be transformed into this resource for visitors to Carolina Beach State Park and provide a model for expansion in additional parks in the future.”

Coastal Eco Explorer is now available for free download on IOS and Android devices. Visit uncw.edu/ed/coastalecoexplorer for additional information, videos and lesson plans.

Avery Owen is a May 2021 graduate of UNCW in environmental science and geospatial technologies. She serves as an Assistant County Ranger for the North Carolina Forest Service in Randolph County.

Scan the QR codes using your mobile device to easily download the app for free.