Hiker's Harvest

Inspiration

One of the most fun elements of exploring nature is foraging for edible plants, but it's also often nerve-wracking. It's so complicated to keep track of which plants are safe and which aren't. Additionally, when foraging with pets, it can be particularly troublesome to keep track of not only plants that are toxic to humans, but also the ones that are toxic to our fur babies.

What it does

Hiker's Harvest enables you to forage safely by providing an easy and straightforward way to check the edibility of a plant, even if you don't know what it is. All it takes is one photo, and the website will figure out what it's called, if you can eat it, if your pets can eat it, and a link to Wikipedia in case you want to learn more.

How we built it

The front-end of the website was designed with Figma and implemented with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The backend was written in Flask and utilizes the PlantNet image recognition API and Trefle, a botanical information API. We also manually collated a bunch of toxicity data for animals, since we struggled to find a central, authoritative source for that information.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time working with a custom domain name, and that ended up causing a lot of very silly bugs. Additionally, as mentioned above, we struggled to find centralized sources for some of our information and had to compile information from a number of animal-rights websites.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, with the amount of difficulty we had with getting the live site to do everything it was supposed to, we're proud that we were able to get the site up and working as intended. We're also proud that we were able to get our 'edibility-for-animals' checker to at least kind of work.

What we learned

We learned a lot about delegation of tasks and working on a team. We also learned a good deal about the nitty-gritty bits of deploying a live website.

What's next for Hiker's Harvest

Hiker's Harvest in its ideal form would be completely offline. We want to give people the ability to forage confidently, wherever they are. We aim to build a fully independent image-recognition library to bring Hiker's Harvest offline. Additionally, we are extraordinarily interested in adding the ability to recognize invasive or endangered species of flora and hope to compile an accessible database that we can use to achieve that.