Eth Holet

It includes two parts: The first part consists of the elaboration of an inventory of the natural spaces of the hydrologic network of the Garonne river (within the limits of Vielha e Mijaran) presenting a special interest to be visited, from the points of view of environmental education, raising of awareness and citizen participation in the topic of environmental conservation, and promotion of sustainable tourism with environmental concern.

This inventory will be the basis to make a selection of sites to design several naturalistic routes to be visited. The second part of the project consists of designing the above mentioned routes and their implementation in an application for mobile devices. The philosophy is to take advantage of the new telecommunication technologies and the la popularization of mobile devices using them with the purpose of substituting the more traditional means ( physical signs, posters, etc.) used in the conditioning and equipment of naturalistic routes. In this way, user may not only receive, but also send and share information through their devices. This may be used to encourage citizen participation, in aspects covering from opinion’s survey to the collaboration in data collection, such as naturalistic observations or alerts of environmental impacts.

The application that will make this information to the public will guide users along the routes using GPS technology, and will manage the information shared by users. The contents supplied will have an educational value, both in the sense of divulgation of naturalistic and ecological basic notions and in the sense of promoting a visit respectful towards the environment and raising awareness about its conservation. The contents will offer the information in a simple way, affordable to any kind of audience. But at the same time, it will allow for more in depth information on user’s demand. The presentation of information will take advantage of all the multimedia capacities of the devices, in order to make it attractive. One important task in the project will be to design and develop the different kinds of contents, which include texts, graphs, maps, interactive pictures and video-clips.