Nature Care

Educating and empowering local community individuals to be active participants in the preservation of Nature!

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Inspiration

African animals display the widest variety in size and structure of any of the continents. Africa is the world's second largest continent with almost 12 million square miles of tropical rain forests, deserts and vast savannas. There are over one million species of animals in Africa, including both the heaviest (elephants) and the tallest (giraffes) land animals on Earth. The challenge which Africa, and other developing nations faces is the lack of knowledge of animal and plant species, and ignorance. People do not have the right tools and incentives to drive them to be more conservative when it comes to nature. For example, just recently, a Swordfish was caught by a local fisherman in Oyorokotor fishing Settlement in Andoni LGA , Rivers state in Nigeria (https://twitter.com/Postsubman/status/1367812910420987907). This swordfish was killed without doing any research on whether or not it was an endangered species. There also other scenarios where people kill animals because they think that they are just witchcraft being done on them by other people. Why is this happening? We believe that one of the reasons to this is the lack of knowledge, tools and incentives to drive people to be more careful and cautious when it comes to matters dealing with their environment. We want to secure the future of developing nations including Africa by empowering and educating people about the species of the world and the species that exist in the local communities.

Securing the future is a collective responsibility that demands us all to be actively involved in protecting the environment, and the species that live in it. Our goal as The Nature Care Team is to educate and empower local community individuals so that they can help identify species - new or exiting - within their community.

What it does

  1. Empower
    • provide animal species recognition capabilities using smart image recognition - a tool which uses Google Vision API.
    • incentivize the identification of species by the local people
    • promote 'Green Ambassadors' - local middle man who will act as the main point of contact on a local level helping to promote, educate and empower the local people to adopt green initiatives that conserve nature's species.
  2. Educate
    • provide a centralized place for individuals to easily find and access information and details about the species that exist in their local communities and the world beyond.
    • use green ambassadors to help with the identification and naming of species using local languages which the people understand.
    • Note: one of the pressing challenges that most developing nations face is that the species or animals that they see do not have names that they can recognize when they search online. One goal of the 'Green Ambassadors' will be to bridge that gap in language barrier by helping us develop framework that people can use to switch between their local languages and the scientific names of the species.
  3. Species Recognition
    • uses Google Vision API to identify an animal from a picture provided by an individual
    • provides real time information about an animal's conservation status
  4. Green Ambassadors
    • advocates who would develop initiatives to educate and empower the local community
    • individuals within a community will have an option to apply to become Green Ambassadors

How we built it

  1. Brainstorm and Research
    • consulted a wild life conservation expert in Nigeria to get an overview of the challenges and concerns that they have.
  2. Flask development
    • developed a web application prototype using the Flask Python Framework, and Bootstrap CSS framework.
  3. Google Maps
    • build a custom species directory map
    • provides information about the species in an area - including information like species migratory patterns, and extinction rates.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Technical
    • accurate image identification
    • IUCN Red List API
      • did not get access to a token for our application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Finding the conservation status of an animal through web-scraping
  2. Identifying the challenge in developing countries and coming up with a solution that has a real-world application and useful to wildlife researchers

What we learned

  1. How to use the Flask framework
  2. Using Beautiful Soup for web-scraping
  3. Being better team players

What's next for Nature Care

  • Accounts
    • enable individuals to have personal accounts where they can keep track of their contributions to nature conservation in their local community.
  • Nature Discovery Reward Points
    • for each validated upload that a community member makes, we give them reward points
    • the users can use these points (once they reach a base level) to visit National Parks or other wildlife reserves.
  • Community Platform
    • enable community members to chat chat and share feedback with each other
    • facilitate networking
  • Develop a running Nature Care Database
    • use it to help users understand key information and patterns about a certain species

## Domain Name

  • enaturecare.tech

Categories

  • Best Overall Hack
  • Best in Theme: Nature
  • Best Overall Hack Runner Up
  • Best Domain Name from Domain.com
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