Trunk Tracker

Inspiration

Here in Davis we are very fortunate to have so many trees spread around campus. They not only provide shade but also reduce CO2 in the air and also save electricity, however many people don't fully realize just how much of an impact trees have.

What it does

The goal of our website is to make information regarding the benefits of trees more accessible to people. It gives projected electricity saved, runoff avoided, CO2, NO2, and O3 reduction. This allows for more people to consider planting a tree themselves, which is better for the environment as a whole.

How we built it

By utilizing the api from i-Tree Planter, we were able to get estimates on how much impact a given tree would have at a certain location. We parsed this data for relevant information, creating a data set of all the benefits of a tree with a given planting scenario. Using MongoDB Atlas we were able to store the data on the cloud and utilize smart searching capabilities.

Challenges we ran into

Writing and reading to MongoDB created numerous issues ranging from objects not transferring from front-end to back-end and vice versa, to formatting issues when data was being read. In addition to that over half of the team has never worked on a large coding project like this one. As a result of this, there were many challenges that came with simply learning how to work with the tools at our disposal, such as Github.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are simply proud of tackling a project like this as a group of mainly beginners who have had limited coding experience. One of the major components of the project that we are proud of, was being able to utilize MongoDB in our project to manage and search through our data set.

What we learned

Throughout the entire 24 hours we have learned a lot about how to break down such a big project into more achievable steps. With so much to do it was very overwhelming to start, but as the day progressed we were able to make progress in steady increments. Through all the sharing of code and individuals working on different sections of the project, we also learned how to communicate effectively as a team.

What's next for Trunk Tracker

Since we were unfortunately unable to implement all of the features into the website that we were hoping to have, our next goal is to be able to add those features. This includes scaling the project to not only include data from Davis. Other ideas include using image recognition to allow someone to upload a picture of a tree, and our website would be able to provide all of the statistics on that just from that one picture.