When the time comes to use the informative Forest Explorer smartphone app as you stroll through Concord’s Merrimack River Conservation Area, take a moment to remember the New Hampshire youth who sacrificed themselves for it.
“I wrote this in blood,” joked Ryan Leo of Londonderry, showing a red smear amid the jottings in a notebook he had just used to smash a mosquito on himself.
Leo is one of a dozen students from throughout New Hampshire enrolled in the Advanced Studies Program ecology class at St. Paul’s School. They write up details on the 2 miles of hiking trails in land owned by the Society for Protection of New Hampshire Forests on the west side of the Merrimack River. The material will be used by the society to create geo-tagged markers that will crop up in their app to tell people about their surroundings.
Monday morning saw the students working on the back half of the trails, away from the river, which is less populated by people but was far more populated by biting insects.
Swarms of mosquitoes filled the hot, still air. Halfway through the hourlong trek earlier this week, the suggestion arose to hold a contest about who could show off the most bites when the class returned to St. Paul’s.
“I’m going to win!” announced Lauren Dean of Gilford, swatting frantically.
Monday’s trek was led by Dave Anderson, director of education for the forest society. As the group walked the trail, he pointed out places where waypoints would be of value to future visitors, with topics ranging from clumps of invasive plants to “otter slides” into the river to wide-ranging hints about the area’s history.
“This would be a good place to talk about burning and flooding,” Anderson said as he led the class over a portion of the Back Bay trail, which loops away from the river to circle past Eastman Cove and Mill Brook. He gestured at the forests and explained how millennia of regular fires and floods shaped many New Hampshire ecosystems until modern society put an end to both, altering the plants and wildlife we find there.
Later, he stood in a dry channel that in centuries past was part of the Merrimack River – it still gets filled in high-water periods and during the Mother’s Day Flood of 2006 almost became a permanent part of the river once again.
“People walk along the river because of the views, but this is the wilder side of the Merrimack,” Anderson said. “This is a floodplain acting like a floodplain.”
The Forest Explorer app, which will get a public “beta test” next week on Mount Major, is an example of augmented reality, or computer-enhanced information and entertainment linked to physical locations. When the app is running, hikers’ phones will have access to text, graphics or videos at various spots along hiking trails, tagged for specific latitude and longitude as determined by the smartphone.
Anderson said the Mount Major app has been in the works for a year, and it will be some time before the Concord Floodplains app becomes available. When it does, material created by the summer school class will be part of it.
APS is a summer residential program held by St. Paul’s School for rising seniors in New Hampshire public or parochial schools. Roughly 250 students are attending and if the ecology class is any indication, it draws from throughout New Hampshire. A dozen students came from 10 different schools, from Nashua to North Conway, Laconia to Londonderry.
Rick Pacelli, who teaches the class, said he talked with the forest society last year about working together and the idea of using students to create material for the online guide. It helps the students, who get hands-on training about local ecology and presenting information, and it helps the society, which gets some high-quality material for free.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” is how Pacelli described it. Which seems appropriate for an ecology class.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
