The Making TRACKS Project (www.makingtrackschallenge.com) is developing a free, permanent, online collection of hiking trails nationally in conjunction with hiking clubs throughout the U.S. We are looking for some help collecting trail data and hoping your Wilmington Trail Club members might be interested in taking part.
Making TRACKS is a unique trail collection in that, in addition to providing information about the trailhead, parking, the hike's distance, difficulty, and description, each trail will automatically generate a color field guide of common species that can be printed out and taken along.
The Making Tracks Challenge further provides resources for schools to develop their own educational nature trails and use them to enhance science and environmental education, with a collection of inquiry-based science activities, fun things to do on the trail and a series of short nature films.
We hope to enhance hiking trails by making them into educational nature trails for beginning naturalists, families and schools. Our goal is to foster a deeper appreciation of the natural world and strengthen conservation awareness.
At this phase of the project, we are collecting trail descriptions from volunteer citizen naturalists. Though the site is open for anyone to download trail descriptions now, the growth of the trail collection is just beginning and is not expected to be comprehensive for many years.
This is why we are contacting you now. We are trying to reach out to hikers everywhere in an effort to expand our trail collection.
We hope you will consider taking part in developing this resource and passing on some information about the Making Tracks project and website to your members.
Please let me know if I can provide any more information. Thank you!
Sheri Amsel
Exploring Nature Educational Resource