CORVALLIS, Ore. — Ever stop to rest under a shady tree in Oregon State University’s Memorial Union quad? Now OSU’s first official Apple-product application will connect a tree admirer with facts about OSU’s most significant trees at the touch of a screen.
The OSU Campus Tr
ee Tour Guide and Reference app project was led by Chris La Belle from the OSU Extension Service’s Extension and Experimental Station Communications office. He had some help from Nick Piatt and Aaron Senecal, who were OSU students when the project began. They both graduated last June.
This venture into mobile device technology enables the Extension Service to modernize its approach to outreach education.
“Extension has a lot of learning that’s place-based,” La Belle said. For example, the reference guide “Trees to Know in Oregon” is one of the Extension Service’s most popular publications and it recently was updated and re-released.
The app has information that details two walking tours: a 10-tree tour and a 27-tree “grand tour.” Taking into account walking and reading time, the tours last 20 minutes to one hour, respectively.
Each tree’s description refers to the page number of “Trees to Know in Oregon.”
La Belle, Piatt and Senecal had the help of Pat Breen, professor emeritus of horticulture who’s led tours of trees on campus and in the city for years. Breen’s extensive experience enabled them to add tidbits of history about notable campus trees to the walking tour app.
For example, a cluster of 90-year-old Sierra redwoods at the northeast corner of the MU quad is unusually tall because it receives regular water and fertilization runoff when the quad’s lawn is maintained in the spring and summer.
Along with the tour option, the app uses GPS technology to pinpoint a user’s location and provide information on the nearby trees. An index feature provides detailed information about each tree.
The program, which operates on Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices, is free and available for download in Apple’s online App Store.
La Belle said they’ve received quite a bit of feedback from universities outside the United States interested in using a similar app for their own campuses and extension programs.
“A lot of people at other universities have a similar need for outreach,” he said, citing Osaka University in Japan as an example.
While researching and building the app, the group found more trees on campus than they had expected.
“We didn’t really notice trees until we had to actually document them,” La Belle said.
La Belle, Piatt and Senecal plan to create another tour for the app but will wait for leaves and flowers to bloom on trees this spring.
“We’re waiting for the weather to turn so we can take the right pictures of the trees,” Piatt said.
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