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Friday, September 25, 2015
Trekker putting Tzouhalem on the map KEVIN ROTHBAUER CITIZEN
Irvin Banman, the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s site manager for Chase Woods and the Cowichan Garry Oak Citizen 2015.pdf 1 07-24-15 3:40 Preserve, headsBanner up theAdMount Tzouhalem trail with thePMGoogle Trekker camera. [KEVIN ROTHBAUER/CITIZEN]
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The popular hiking trail that leads up Mount Tzouhalem to the cross that overlooks Cowichan Bay will soon be accessible from anywhere in the world thanks to the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Google. The trail, which traverses the NCC’s Chase Woods Nature Preserve as well as the province’s Mount Tzouhalem Ecological Reserve and Providence Farm, is one of six sites across Canada that the NCC has selected to capture with the Google Trekker camera. The camera is a 50-pound soccer ball-sized green sphere containing 15 separate lenses and mounted on a backpack The Google Trekker captures a 360-degree view of its surroundings every 2.5 seconds. Each image is automatically tagged with a GPS location. The resulting footage will be stitched together by Google and added to the Google Maps and Street View system so anyone
with computer access can see what it is like to hike to the summit through Mount Tzouhalem’s coastal Douglas fir forests. “It’s like Street View, but it takes you to places you can’t access with a car,” NCC west coast stewardship coordinator Katy Fulton said. The NCC approached Google about the possibility of borrowing the Trekker equipment, and the tech company was immediately interested. “The Nature Conservancy of Canada is excited about this new collaboration with Google. Now Canadians will be able to virtually visit protected areas that many of them have helped to support,” said Nancy Newhouse, acting regional vice president for NCC in British Columbia. “We are one of the first groups to take on the Google data collection process ourselves. We are using state of the art technology to digitally map some of our most amazing places. See GOOGLE, Page 10