Awards & Nominations
iPlant has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
iPlant
Summary
iPlant is a website created to fight deforestation. Made easy for use, its main goal is to maximize the green surfaces. This initiative aims to have a big effect on sustainability by conserving habitats. Our website allows everyone to be part of this initiative by planting their trees. Firstly they need to register on our platform. After this, they can donate to the plantation. Once the users have done that they can locate their trees and also see their development. Except that they have their unique QR code, and depending on users’ wish they can write a message.To sum it up, our website not only makes fighting deforestation easier but also raises awareness of youngsters to these topics.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our challenge is “Sustain”, sustaining our planet for the other generations. Motivated from the immediateneed of action we decided to create a solution that could help sustain the planet's equilibrium. Our planet is perfect, but our lifestyles have caused catastrophic consequences, one of which is deforestation. This has faced us with a chain of other dangerous changes, however, we are still on time. Our fast lifestyles, busy schedules, and even the pandemic have made it almost impossible for people to plant and take care of trees. Taking advantage of the progress of technology and NASA's data we were able to locate the most affected areas by deforestation (through satellite images) and give people the comfort to bring a change without stepping out of their house. Our project aims to protect the sustainability of our planet's flora and keep the level of CO2 emissions under control. Another part of our challenge is to make our solution approachable by the younger generation which is less informed and interested. We also dealt with this making “forestation” seem like a fun game competition and not an actual duty of ours. So our solution was able to deal with this challenge with full capacity: protecting the planet and engaging the younger generation.
How We Developed This Project
What’s a better inspiration than helping Mother Nature? Observing all the damage caused by the human hand, an idea flashed in front of our eyes. To reduce carbon emissions and sustain the environment for generations to come, we thought of making a web application to make planting trees more fun for all ages. We first started work in a localhost environment. Our website is mainly built with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL for the queries, and for the database we used phpMyAdmin. We first worked our way through the main pages like the home page, log in, and register functionalities, and the mailing system. Parallel to this we were also designing custom images, wallpapers, and working on the content. Then we finished setting up our databases on the local phpMyAdmin environment and went on into working with the other pages like profile, the leaderboard system, and hall of trees which included all the trees planted by the users. After setting up most of the website we worked on hosting the website. We got a domain and hosted the website on the hosting service. We had some problems with the domain registrar at first but were able to get through it. We uploaded all the files and finally, the website was online. But we noticed a problem with our QR code scanner. Most of the web browsers won’t allow access to the camera for non-https websites, so we were able to hook it up with a Cloudflare account and give it an SSL certificate. After fixing all the issues we went on to conclude our project. Using data from NASA satellites and climate databases we were able to detect areas with high CO2 emissions and deforestation problems. These would be the areas where we would deploy our web application and advertise it the most. Then we were able to work on our presentation video, together with fixing other minor code errors.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
iPlant is not only a website to encourage people to plant trees but also raise awareness about the dangers of deforestation, pollution, or climate change. That’s why we used CO2 and NO2 emissions data from NASA. We displayed live CO2 emissions per year graphs and used satellite images to detect areas where we could deploy our web app and make the change. But most of our work is based on NASA's satellite images. With this information, we were able to locate the areas with the most desperate need of help. In this way the act on the most severe areas making a bigger impact.
Some of data links:
-https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/jjfast/jj_mapmonitor_phase1.html
-https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/palsar_fnf/fnf_index.html
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
[NASA Air Quality (NO2 emissions)-Data]
(https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/)
[NASA Climate (Live CO2 emissions)-Data]
[NASA Worldview (Live satellite imagery)]
(https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/)
[NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS)](https://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/GIBS/GIBS+Available+Imagery+Products#expand-CarbonDioxide4Products)
[Jaxa maps and satellite imagery]
(https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/jjfast/jj_mapmonitor_phase1.html)
(https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ALOS/en/palsar_fnf/fnf_index.html)