Gila National Forest New Mobile App Helps Educate and Guide Visitors

Category: Front Page News Front Page News
Published: 16 August 2017 16 August 2017

App Powered by OnCell Provides Self-Guided Tour and Essential Visitor Information

Silver City, NM, August 16 2017—The Gila National Forest has partnered with OnCell to launch a mobile app for visitors. The app will allow visitors to take a self-guided tour of the natural and heritage sites within the forest using their personal mobile devices. The app also serves as communication tool and allows the forest staff to deliver the latest information and news to visitors.

Public Affairs Officer Marta Call said “A smartphone is a valuable part of a traveler’s toolkit. The apps will be a great way for forest rangers and staff to provide educational interpretive messages and real time alerts to visitors through their personal devices. We wanted to provide consistent interpretive messages, 24/7.”

The tour portion of the app features forest facts, historic and cultural information, unique imagery, and an audio tour, all keeping with the staff’s interpretive and educational goals for visitors. The app also features offline and GPS maps to help visitors discover points of interest and explore the forest.

By downloading the app, additional content such as trail information, recreational opportunities, and visitor center locations offer visitors access to essential visitor information in the event there is no connectivity. Visitors can also receive the latest news from the forest such as events or closures, and enable them to report issues encountered or offer feedback about their experience.

OnCell, a leader in the mobile tour space for destinations, helped the Gila National Forest launch an app with ranger and staff-curated content. The forest will continue to use the OnCell app builder to extend the experience with more points of interest and additional wayfinding information. Rangers will also use the app to send time sensitive messages to users, such as emergency alerts.

Forest Supervisor Adam Mendonca stated: “Our rangers and interpreters worked together to produce unique stories about our forest. We dug through our archives to share images that visitors would not otherwise see. ”

The app is one of many upcoming forest apps as part of a new mobile program created by the national office in Washington, D.C. It aims to give each forest the foundation to provide educational mobile tours.

Visitors can access the apps by downloading them from the App Store or Google Play. A web app can also be accessed on demand at https://gilanf.oncell.com/en/index.html 

For information on the Gila National Forest, check out our website at http://www.fs.usda.gov/gila 

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