Greenwood

Greenwood is an app that lets the user take action fighting climate change and mass extinctions through CO2 tracking and the creation of wildlife gardens.

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Greenwood

Alexander Saigh

Jorge Cantu

Greenwood is a CO2 tracking app that lets the user track how much carbon dioxide they have sequestered based on the type of tree they plant, its location and the climate. Greenwood also includes resources to create gardens for endangered species native to specific geographic regions.

Many people want to reduce their carbon footprint but few know how to measure it. Additionally ecologically focused individuals want to track and see how much carbon dioxide their garden sequesters and how much CO2 planting a tree will sequester.

Currently, Greenwood can only measure the CO2 sequestered from trees and not other plants in the garden. In the future it will measure accurately the impact of planting plants in your garden as well as grasses on your lawn. It will also accurately measure the CO2 sequestered in soil. Users would also be able to make their own profiles so we could measure the impact of everyone’s garden. We would promote and include resources for green roofs too. We also wanted to include 2 other sections but did not have the time to put them in. We would also expand the information and provide tracking information for the endangered wildlife gardens. Currently we did not include anything that would allow users to track the impacts of their wildlife garden. In the future we will also have specific instructions on how to make these gardens.

Many apps and programs measure the carbon footprints of their users but few if any can measure the impact of the plants that they plant. Greenwood can do just that. The problem with tree planting efforts is that most are not engaging. With users motivated and capable of measuring their impact over time this app will achieve higher success rates.

This app also shows resources for users to make gardens specifically for endangered wildlife. There are no apps that give users information on making endangered wildlife gardens. Species become endangered when cities become deserts. Many people only know the threats the publicized species and not many other vital species that do not receive nearly as much media coverage. Many people want to take action but do not know how. Greenwood is the answer.

We were inspired to make this hack because although there are many tracking apps, many leave out trees and gardens while none of them help users to act on endangered species.

When creating this app, we utilized HTML, CSS, Javascript/React, and the Ionic framework, all of which were our first time experiencing these tools. The reason for choosing Ionic in the beginning was because it allows a project to be exported to desktop and mobile applications from a single codebase, although throughout working on this project I also discovered other aspects that made choosing this framework a great choice, such as useful documentation, the syntax being easy to understand within a short period of time, and having advanced features built into the framework such as scaling the app depending on the device.

The format of the code is split into different tabs, with each tab representing the different topics in the app. For each tab, we created a Javascript/Typescript file, as well as a CSS file. The Javascript file formats and displays the information in the app, such as the text, buttons, and images. The CSS file modifies aspects of the different modules built into the framework, such as the text color, background color, and text alignment. In addition, there is a Javascript file that links the different tabs together, which allows the user to access the information about a specific tab when the tab is clicked.

Our hack should win because the concept is unique and has the potential to create a great amount of impact. Saving our wildlife is just as important as reducing CO2 emissions. This app lets you discover how to play an active part in saving endangered species. Overall, this project was very fun to work on and we enjoyed the hackathon. We would definitely do this again.

As a social impact entrepreneur I will pursue this project sometime in the future. I really enjoyed working on this and think it's a good and novel idea that could benefit the world. -Alexander

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