The United States National Science Foundation generously funded a Virginia Tech grant titled “EAGER: SAI: SmarTrail: An Infrastructure Services Framework for Sustainable Trail Management” that is investigating ways to identify, communicate, and address sustainability issues on long-distance trails like the Appalachian Trail. EAGER grants like this one explore potentially transformative research areas. This grant–through interviews, surveys, social media analysis, and mobile phone app deployment–seeks to understand the role of digital technologies in supporting sustainable trail management on the Appalachian Trail (the AT). The project runs from 2021 until 2025.

The multidisciplinary project is led by Kris Wernstedt of the School of Public and International Affairs and includes as co-PIs Scott McCrickard of the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Human Computer Interaction, Shalini Misra of the School of Public and International Affairs, and Jeff Marion of the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and the USGS. Grad students Norhan Abdelgawad (Public and International Affairs), Morva Saaty (Computer Science), Jaitun Patel (Computer Science), and Yusheng Cao (Computer Science) are assisting on the project, along with other grad students and undergrads.

This page gathers some of the project outcomes, situating them within the goals of the project. Many of these are elaborated on the Tech on the Trail blog. Current outcomes include:

• Hot Springs TrailFest 2025: PIs Kris Wernstedt and Scott McCrickard, along with students Yusheng Cao and Wei-Lu Wang, attended TrailFest 2025 in Hot Springs NC. The festival was cancelled last year due to hurricane damage, and we were happy to return this year and support the local community. We connected with the community, hosted a booth in the festival area, and distributed our SmartTrail app (and lots of snacks!) to thru-hikers. Read about our trip on the blog at https://techonthetrail.net/2025/04/30/hot-springs-trailfest-2025/.
• Appalachian Trail Gateways Festival 2025: PIs Kris Wernstedt and Scott McCrickard, along with students Yusheng Cao, Jennifer Chandran, and Gibbs Gresge, launched the latest version of the SmartTrail app, a weekly questionnaire for long-distance hikers that helps assess the mental and physical issues that hikers experience. For now, participation is limited to AT thru hikers who sign up with us at the festival, but future participation at festivals is planned and there may be other opportunities to participate. Contact us for details. REDEEM POLICY APP Privacy Policy. We also gave a presentation about some of our projects, available here. And read a writeup about our trip on the blog at https://techonthetrail.net/2025/02/16/appalachian-trail-gateways-2025/.
• Journal of Environmental Management 2024 paper: Project co-PI Shalini Misra led a paper analyzing our trail maintainer interviews from 2022, resulting in a framework for smart and sustainable resource management.  Leveraging the interviews, the framework put forth  challenges posed by digital technologies for sustainable resource management grouped into four categories: technological, organizational, ethical, and experiential. For each category, our paper proposes management needs for smart and sustainable resource management. Learn more about this work at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972403408X.
• CHI 2024 paper: Project grad student Morva Saaty led a late-breaking work at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, published and presented in May 2024. This research focuses on the emotional life of long-distance hikers on the Appalachian Trail using large user-generated data from community blogs. In particular, this paper identifies the basic emotions expressed by hikers and explores the underlying factors (e.g., weather and social constructs) that trigger these emotions. This research highlights the power of leveraging blogs in understanding the real aspects of trail life and, in general, community experiences. You can find more about our paper here.
• Appalachian TrailFest 2023 in Hot Springs NC: PI Kris Wernstedt, co-PI Scott McCrickard, grad students Morva Saaty and Jaitun Patel, and undergrad Jennifer Chandran attended the Hot Springs Appalachian TrailFest in April 2023. They launched the latest version of the SmarTrail app, a weekly questionnaire for long-distance hikers that helps assess the mental and physical issues that hikers experience. They also interviewed 8 thru-hikers as well as highlighting other projects related to Virginia Tech’s Tech on the Trail initiative and ICTAS diversity-related outdoor games project. And there were trail-themed food and giveaways! We had a great spot for our tent near the registration booth, next to some of the government agencies who help maintain the trail. If you want to learn more, download all of the featured flyers here or drop us an email.
• Thru-hike 2023 kickoff meeting: Project PI Kris Wernstedt attended the Appalachian Trail Kick-Off Weekend on March 3-5 in Amicalola Falls, GA. He interviewed thru-hikers who were starting their 2000-mile journeys along the AT, and he promoted an early version of our SmarTrail mobile phone app that helps assess the mental and physical issues that hikers experience during this long journey.
• Trail maintainer interviews 2022: This round of stakeholder interviews, held in Spring 2022, focused on investigating how digital information systems can support sustainable trail, camping, and visitor use management on the AT. We interviewed trail managers and stewards to learn how AT hikers use smartphones, apps, and social media in their communications related to safety information, regulations, educational messaging, and stewardship. We are analyzing the collected interviews to identify opportunities for using technologies to enhance conservation objectives; e.g., to reduce visitor crowding, flatten the thru-hiker “bubble”, reduce camping impacts, communicate Leave No Trace impacts, and understand hiker behaviors. Full writeups of our results appeared in our Journal of Environmental Management paper as described above.
• ALDHA 2022 workshop: Four members of our research team attended the 2022 Appalachian Trail Long Distance Hikers Association meeting (ALDHA 2022) in Abingdon VA in September 2022. We presented a workshop titled Trail Apps: Digital Trail Magic or Duds. It likened the explosion of digital technology on the AT to the opening of a Pandora Box, probing former AT thru-hikers about their likes and dislikes of various platforms and debate whether these technologies have changed the zen of a long-distance hike. Reactions were generally hostile to the possibility that technology could overwhelm trail experiences, though with acknowledgement that there are benefits to technology as well. A description of the workshop can be found here.
• COMPASS 2022 paper: Grad student Morva Saaty led a note at the ACM Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS), published and presented in June 2022. The paper examined data from the social media platform Reddit that focused on AT thru-hike experiences, and the presentation . As expected, the most frequently discussed topics were on planning and preparing for the AT hike, but hikers also discussed trail experiences and sustainable practices. Read more about the conference at the blog post, and the paper can be downloaded here.
• Pine Grove Furnace and beyond 2021-2023: To help identify promising project directions, Project PI Kris Wernstedt interviewed thru hikers at Pine Grove Furnace, a state park in Pennsylvania that is often considered the midpoint of the Appalachian Trail. This was followed up with surveys of local officials at trail towns along the Appalachian Trail, and an initial pilot study of hikers that explored when and how they used technology to stay in contact with friends while on the trail. Read about some of the results on the blog.
• Project kickoff meeting 2022: Our project team held a kickoff meeting in Staunton VA for a project kickoff meeting in January 2022. Results from the meeting and an announcement of the project goals can be found here.
• ICSE Gone Walking project 2020-2021: We are grateful to Virginia Tech’s Institute for Society, Culture and Environment (ICSE) for funding a seed project to explore the risk, resource management, and social informatics in the hiking community. The 2020-2021 Scholars Program funds helped us do the work toward crafting our successful proposal to the National Science Foundation’s Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) program.

Please contact Scott McCrickard at mccricks@cs.vt.edu for more information about any of these outcomes, or for ways to get involved in ongoing research.