Annapolis Valley Trails Coalition (AVTC) manages and maintains the 110 km of former rail line trail recently branded the Harvest Moon Trail. It runs from Grand-Pré to Annapolis Royal through little towns, agricultural fields and along the Annapolis River. The trails coalition has one co-ordinator who knows there is a better way to manage assets and improve data collection efficiencies but he needs our technical how-to help.

Over the course of the fall semester, students at COGS (Centre of Geographic Sciences) explored scalable Enterprise GIS solutions to manage trail assets. They modelled and built a spatial database and integrated it within desktop and web GIS solutions.

A considerable amount of work the trails co-ordinator does is in the field. Part of the project involved exploring field mobility options and testing workflows in the field and with integrating data back into the spatial database.

Once assets were mapped, students’ final task was to build web mapping prototypes displaying such things as user counts or basic trail assets. Students wrapped up the project with a final presentation of their work to the AVTC stakeholders. This presentation will cover the various stages of teaching and learning we experienced while building a GIS for a real-world client.