With the issue of the slow decline of native plant species populating the islands, we conceptualized a platform to organize and discover these plants with the intent of having a constant stream of information of new or undiscovered endangered species. The platform is meant to be an app that uses the phone’s internal camera as a vehicle to use image recognition to discover these plants. Upon taking a picture, if the plant is recognized as an endangered or unknown species, the location and its picture along with time stamps would be uploaded and stored in a database where restoration organizations can have access to. This will allow field workers to avoid backtracking, find plants and species efficiently, and be able to narrow down information regarding a specified area.
While trying to bring our concept to life we did run into a few troubles. The idea, while achievable, isn’t realistic for our tier of coding capability in the time frame given and we did our best to create an explainable front end that can accompasses our direction with this project. However, we do believe the concept to be valid and reproducible and are willing to pursue it’s development with the necessary resources needed as it can be a highly resourceful tool for native Hawaiian plant restoration efforts. While researching a database of native plants we realized how extensive this issue expands over the islands and how important it is to keep these native plant species alive and well as we may be taking them for granted while we have them. We have a firm belief that the integration of an app such as this can take the efforts of the KUPU program to new heights and make it possible to truly restore some of the island current dying species and bring back the plants that make our island beautiful.
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