CET(CITES-plants E-commerce Tracker)

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  CITEs-plants list

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  Medicinal plants list

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  Plants flagged on e-commerce platforms

Inspiration

With the increased trafficking of endangered wildlife plants on e-commerce platforms, it has been difficult for wildlife conservation authorities to track it which continues to threaten the existence of those plants. Therefore, a need for a monitoring system.

What it does

• Monitors and flags the sale of any endangered species on the e-commerce platforms thus creating awareness to the wildlife authority.
• Centralizes three databases to come up with an efficient search algorithm that will ease the monitoring.

How we built it

• Pulled data from various databases into one central database.
• Built an API with sufficient search algorithms for monitoring e-commerce platforms.
• Built a User Interface where the search results will be displayed to the end-users.

Challenges we ran into

• Difficulty in accessing data from e-commerce platforms, common names, and scientific names.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Being able to retrieve some CITES data.
• Getting more knowledge about wildlife has given us a better understanding and enabled us to come up with satisfactory documentation.

What we learned

• We learned that there are authorized wildlife traders and a policy that protects them.
• We learned that plants can be endangered too.
• We learned about the NFA.
• We learned about the levels of protection of different plants.
• We learned that plants are also trafficked.

What's next for CET(CITES-plants E-commerce Tracker)

• Ability to add picture recognition or text analysis tool to be able to distinguish real plants from other related stuff that do NOT contain any actual plant materials e.g paintings.
• Having a list of legal wildlife traders so that we match the seller's name against the legal names in our system.

Built With

• bootstrap
• django
• django-rest
• javascript
• postgresql
• python
• react