Taking education to the woods

URI students in the university’s North Woods program.

Excerpted (except f0r picture above) from an ecoRI News article by Bonnie Phillips

KINGSTON, R.I. — What do you get when you take a 300-plus-acre parcel of undeveloped woodlands with a walking trail and add high-tech flourishes such as an augmented reality walking tour and explanatory maps?

You get the North Woods at the University of Rhode Island — an outdoor classroom used to teach ornithology, herpetology, entomology, wetland ecology, environmental writing, art, and science communications.

“Really, everything is studied here,” said Madison Jones, an associate professor in URI’s departments of Professional & Public Writing and Natural Resources Science.

On a recent walk along the Blue Trail in the woods, which are in the northern part of the campus off Flagg Road and make up 25% of the university’s 1,200-acre total, Jones was almost evangelical about the educational possibilities of the North Woods.

Here’s the whole article.