Temporal Flare

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by one of the biggest issues with our environment that has been prevalent for the past 50,000 years. Biodiversity loss is a complex issue in our environment that will worsen in the future, and we chose this because we want everyone to be aware of how biodiversity loss affects us. Many environmental issues such as wildfires, natural disasters, animal extinction, etc. Since those three issues are the most common results of biodiversity loss, we decided to create tools that will help mitigate them.

What it does

We have 2 tools, one that tracks wildfires in the United States, and another that tracks endangered species and explains their importance to human life and ecosystems on Earth.

How we built it

We split up the project into the frontend and backend and had our group split into our strengths. Initially, we knew that we’d want real-time data so we spent time searching for APIs to provide us with exactly that. We used flask in the backend to process the requests and provide us with the response. The API key we used for the AI was a key provided by openrouter using the gemini 2.0 model. The website itself has sections as well as an input for the API key to provide updated information from within the last week.

Challenges we ran into

In using Replit we encountered a lot of issues in just general coding. For instance, when coding the backend, it wouldn’t let us code by ourselves. We had to make a prompt just asking for a hello world output so we could then input our code. Initially, we were trying to use google ai studio for the API key, but no matter how hard we tried it wouldn’t work so we had to swap. Additionally, Replit adds an extra secret/environment so we were confused as to why our AI requests were failing when we tested.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re extremely proud with how the website looks. Honestly, it fits the theme we were going for completely. Additionally, we aren’t that experienced at the backend side of things so it was fun learning new things about how to run the API we created.

What we learned

We learned that biodiversity loss is not only an issue for environmental and animal activists to care about, but for everyone. This issue affects everyone’s quality of life.

What's next for Temporal Flare

We plan to implement a new tool that will track and predict additional natural disasters in a user’s area, including but not limited to hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis. This expands our scope beyond just wildfires and allows users to be informed of any disaster that could affect them or the planet’s biodiversity.