Inspiration
Team 4 DROP TABLES was inspired by Cal Poly Humboldt's commitment to extensive ecological documentation. We're proud to present a tool that helps us visualize community-sourced ecological data in a simplistic, user-friendly way.
What it does
We pull ‘projects’ and ‘observations’ directly from iNaturalist, and allow users to explore the data on an interactive map or in a list view.
How we built it
To build this project, we used: React 19 with Vite Mapbox GL JS for Map Rendering Tailwind CSS iNaturalist API Vercel for Hosting
Challenges we ran into
It's always a challenge to learn new technologies, especially under strict constraints like a 24-hour time limit. With that being said, we had fun becoming more comfortable with Vite, and hosting on Vercel was certainly a new experience as well. It was especially tricky learning how to integrate a third-party dataset, like iNaturalist's open data, into our app.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're especially proud of our iNaturalist API integration.
What we learned
It was the first time a few of us had ever used a third-party API to fetch large amounts of data. It's really satisfying to see a framework we created populate with data from a high-quality source.
What's next for Data Explorer
In the future, we'd like to use MongoDB to integrate multiple data sources and make them queryable with the speed you'd expect from a relational database model. We'd also love to add user accounts and allow users to save and favorite the projects and observations they are most intrigued by.
