Planty

Planty aims to make the world greener by encouraging growing plants native to your local area via personalized plant recommendations & plant identification.

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Inspiration

In today’s world, environmentalism is certainly a hot-topic when it comes to discussing global crises. People are concerned about the health of the environment, but how can one accomplish that beyond taking in nebulous slogans such as “Be green!” A recent study has found that 53% of total average household water use in California ( >190 gallons/day) was used for landscaping and other outdoor uses. Gardens all over the world are using non-native plants, unfit for the local climate and using more water than necessary. So how can we change this? How can we encourage the use of native plants by gardeners, landscapers, and developers?

By planting native plants, you can:

  • Save less water
  • Use less chemical fertilizers
  • Support local birds and other wildlife
  • Improve the environment via reduced noise and carbon pollution from lawn mover exhaust, as well as storing greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

What it does

Planty is a fast and sleek web-app that provides native plant recommendations based on the user’s current location. Each recommendation comes with plant details, care tips, and various images.

How we built it

We built this as an Angular app in Typescript. APIs used: Geolocation API - obtains the user’s current location USDA Plant Database API - queries the database and filters based on the user’s information to obtain native plants Google Custom Search - dynamically obtains several images for each recommendation

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding a suitable USDA plant API that was detailed enough to provide native status information
  • Getting around the limitations of the USDA plant API: cannot filter by location/region, so we had to obtain a set number of plants and filter each plant post-query

What's next for Planty

  • Finish plant image recognition/classifier so users can quickly check if a plant is native to their location & learn more about the photographed plant.
  • Allow users to compare sets of plants in terms of water consumption, allowing them to see how much water they could save if their garden utilized native plants.
  • Add more general information about the benefits of native plants.
  • Mobile app support

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