Today@Dal

From the July 24 edition of the Chronicle Herald:

Jeff Morton’s inspiration came about simply enough.

Morton, the co-grounds manager and an instructor in the Environmental Sciences department at Dalhousie’s agricultural campus in Bible Hill, hit on his brainstrom while searching for a particular bar in downtown Halifax.

He found his destination through the Stroll Halifax GPS app offered by Colibri Software in Wolfville and decided to investigate the company and the app’s potential further.

“This is a living laboratory for our classes,” Morton said as he looked over the campus’s beautiful half-hectare rock garden.

And he wondered if the hundreds of species of trees and plants in the university’s gardens could become accessible to students via their smartphones.

After eight months of work and the help of a $31,000 grant from the faculty of agriculture’s innovation fund, the campus grounds staff and Colibri will launch a mobile app today for the agricultural campus to deliver content to students and visitors as they interact with the gardens.

Morton said he will be able to set up, change and manage content that will be available to students on mobile devices.

“You can be walking along and a tree or a plant will be tagged with a geo-location,” said Morton, 54, who grew up near the campus. “It will have push notification, pushing you out to a website, text or video tagged with each location.”

Read the rest of this article online.