Project Overview
To better serve visitors to The UC Merced Vernal Pools and Grasslands Reserve, the Naturalist App Engineering Service Learning team is creating a mobile application that will serve as a site specific field guide. This app will enhance community access and understanding of the Reserve via the development of a field guide to our local flora and fauna, and localized trails, and landmarks. Additionally, the app will serve as a tool to aid researchers at the Vernal Pool Reserve to better analyze and identify flora and fauna that live within the Merced Vernal Pools Reserve by providing opportunities to document spatial and environmental data using mobile devices to a centralized Reserve database.
Current Status
By dividing into sub-teams, the Nat App Engineering Service Learning team to divide the work and meet deadlines. The Animal sub-team has gathered information for a total of 12 Animals (5 birds, 7 mammals). The plant sub-team has gathered data for 9 plants. The App sub-team started coding in Telerik and is expected to export that into an Android data base in order to test the code by the midpoint of the Spring 2016 semester. We anticipate initial testing of the app to begin on February 22, 2016.
