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Homepage
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Inspiration
Invasive species are plants, animals, or other organisms that are introduced into a new environment and have the potential to cause harm to native species and the ecosystem. They disrupt the natural balance of ecosystems and can cause significant ecological and economic damage. Preventing the introduction and spread of invasive species is critical to preserving biodiversity and protecting the environment.
What it does
Forage is a web application where users can upload pictures of plants that they take and the application will automatically identify the type of plant it is. It will then tell the user whether the plant is invasive or not and give points accordingly. This allows individuals to know what plants they should remove from their communities to protect the ecosystem while leaving native plants healthy. Users can compete to see who has the highest score in our leaderboard and they also get personal achievements for their progress visible on their profile page.
How we built it
We used several web frameworks including node.js, and React to build the website. The backend is handled using Express and a MySQL database to store user data and point values. The frontend is all custom HTML and CSS that we wrote during the hackathon.
Challenges we ran into
We had to figure out how to interface both with an external API for image recognition as well as our own MySQL database. It was a challenge being able to handle the queries asynchronously and update our frontend when results were available.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were happy to be able to finish the project within time and we're happy with the functionality and usability. It was exciting to see our idea go from just a dream to reality in a few short hours!
What we learned
It was a great learning experience developing a web app and we learned valuable skills from the full-stack development. These can be applied to future projects readily and helped strengthen our computer science foundation.
What's next for Forage
This project was just an initial step toward solving the problem of invasive species. In order to make our project better, we need to release our app to a larger audience as the power comes from crowd-sourcing efforts.
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