Team EZ| Planet, With People

Awards & Nominations

Team EZ has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Planet, With People

Your challenge is to build on the Human Planet Initiative of the Group on Earth Observations to apply new methods for mapping attributes of human populations. How can Human Planet data from NASA and other sources be used to improve or update maps or other information important to a problem that concerns you? Design or create a tool or service to accomplish this.

Biking for the Better

Summary

Our project uses BMNGLandsatLayer in conjunction with publicly available information to plot out various bike routes/lanes in cities across the US, showing what and where is accessible by bike. By finding out which urban centers lack bicycle friendly roads, researchers can make an impact on greenhouse emissions with strategically placed bike lanes.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an app that shows various bike routes throughout US cities. It could be used for many things, from commute planning to deciding tourist destinations. By showing where bike friendly streets and bicycle routes are, scientists can get a better idea of where people, especially people with bikes, are located. If a large city has only a small number of bike-friendly roads, by adding any amount of bike lanes, traffic can be eased up and the city would be more accessible, along with reducing the carbon footprint associated with driving.

How We Developed This Project

We chose this challenge because our team enjoys cycling. In addition, cycling is one of the beneficial and favorite activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We thought it would be beneficial to see the overlap between human infrastructure, population, and hobbies (cycling). We implemented a website using Microsoft Visual Studio Code as the programming IDE; Javascript/Css/Html are the primary programming languages utilized in the project; We also use GitHub as our source code repositories, and as our hosting environment for our website.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used BMNGLandsatLayer from NASA, as the base map layer for our app. We also used Web WorldWind JavaScript API from NASA as our mapping tool, which were essential parts of our project.

Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
  1. Map programming API: Web WorldWind from NASA at https://nasaworldwind.github.io/WebWorldWind/
  2. Blue Marble and Landsat image layer from NASA
  3. Bike route map data https://catalog.data.gov/dataset
  4. TIGERweb Web Map Service https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/arcgis/services/TIGERweb/tigerWMS_Current/MapServer/WMSServer?request=GetCapabilities&service=WMS
Tags
#cycling #infrastructure #roads #routes
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.