Bark To The Future

Saturday 18th March

Recently, I got an opportunity to develop an app for the Rainforest Restoration Project (RRP) - a service that runs at my school. Shourya, my friend and one of the chairs of the RRP reached out to me about some tech troubles they've been facing and if I could help them to find a solution. I was super excited to collaborate with the team - I truly believe in their mission and have been happy to be able to contribute. Later, we met to brainstorm and landed on the idea to develop an app: a long-lasting system for students to stay organised and maintain records of their saplings - Project TreeTrove.

In the RRP, they raise saplings and deploy them once they are ready on school campuses, and in national parks with the support of the government. The service aims to revive and integrate often endangered indigenous tree species to promote biodiversity and reduce the effects of deforestation and environmental exploitation. To do so the team plants and oversees a large plot of saplings as they develop. Once they are ready to plant the saplings are then transplanted to various locations, occasionally en masse. They also collaborate with universities to perform research, for example, by measuring the effects of various factors on plant nutrition and growth. By running events in the school, they also raise awareness of the issues surrounding deforestation.

Currently, the team uses a google sheets document to track information about all the different saplings such as height, nutrition, and infestation status (if applicable). However, the team has faced some difficulties when considering image functionality. which would require individually uploading all the images of the plants to google drive and then copying the link into google sheets. This solution does not allow the team to preview the image for a given row of the table and creates lots of friction from taking the photos to implementing them into the sheet. Their data is also fragmented into many documents from the turnover in the leadership and student body, who often employ different systems to manage and change the data which culminated in errors and inconsistent records. 

Another issue the team faces has to do with maintaining old data values to track the progress of the database over time on a plant-to-plant basis. With google sheets, there is also lost potential for an integrated system that could maintain this database and enable functionality such as informing watering cycles and treatment programs. Additionally, data analysis software could allow the team to test the effects of various programs and suggest new programs to address negative patterns in the data. This could aid in research and provide partnered universities with a powerful new tool. 

It would also open the doors to new possibilities such as implementing computer vision to instantly diagnose plants and automatically populate plant information from a single image. It could allow for the instant recognition of plants from images to identify them and link them to their existing data, similar to google lens. Alongside new data visualization tools, deeper insights can become more easily accessible with a user-friendly interface; one that would allow for the transmission of analysis techniques and logs for future members of the club students. The possibilities are endless! 

Ultimately, this tool would serve as a very promising endeavor that would solve a plethora of issues and simultaneously create exciting new ventures in this already fruitful project with the amazing foresight of data analytics - from increased research capabilities and the ability to perform instant analysis with flexible computer vision tools, or the evaluation of diverse planting configurations with subsets of specific species to maximise growth.  As a result, TreeTrove will power future innovation in the space of deforestation and sustainability.

I plan to open-source this project to allow other similar initiatives to benefit from the merits of this application and contribute their ideas to it and help it grow further. I hope that this would inspire and foster new connections between communities and leave a lasting green impact on our world. Stay in tune for future updates!