Carp Patrol

Logo
Map pins
Mobile app screen shot

Inspiration

Our video demo: https://youtu.be/WVM1hvydv3g

Check out this video for a 2 minute primer on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPeg1tbBt0A

Team member Dan is from Michigan (the "Great Lakes State"), where his father was an aquatic biologist, and witnessed first hand the threat Asian carp pose to the region. Asian carp are an invasive species threatening the Great Lakes freshwater fishery--a fishery which represents over 20% of the planet's fresh water and thus sustains a thriving fishing industry worth an estimated $7 billion. Asian carp are voracious eaters who out-compete all native species without any natural competition.

What it does

Biologist researchers have developed data-and-time-intensive algorithms for anticipating where Asian carp are likely to be spawning--which is the best time to address them. Our mobile app saves field researchers tremendous amounts of time by crunching large amounts of data in the cloud that would otherwise need to be manually charted out by hand and take dozens of minutes per calculation (of which one may perform many dozen calculations per day). Minimizing this load on over-worked/under-funded researchers and presenting the data to them on a familiar Google Maps interface enables them to focus their efforts upon planning for sampling and prevention efforts.

How we built it

Technically speaking, the app pulls water temperature and water flow-rate data from government apis--this is huge amounts of data, gigabytes--which is then stored in an AWS C3 and batch processed using algorithms developed by biologists, then we cache the final values to be made available instantaneously to researchers via marker pins on the familiar Google Maps interface.

Challenges we ran into

The data required to calculate the cumulative degree days per location was unexpectedly large (30,000+ lines of data per measurement site, of which there are thousands), and thus requires the data to be stored in dedicated storage and to be batch processed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Everything :-)

What we learned

It seems no matter how closely you read a spec beforehand, there are always hidden obstacles that will reveal themselves mid-project. We also learned how valuable this solution would be to researchers in the field!

What's next for Carp Patrol

Trend analytics to enable researchers forecasting capabilities, notifications for highly suitable spawning conditions, and reporting capabilities for individual reporting stations.