GreenTea(m) - BloomFinder| To Bloom or Not to Bloom

Project Details

The Challenge | To Bloom or Not to Bloom

Your challenge is to solve the mystery behind algal blooms! What factors cause blooms in some water bodies but not others, and how can we better predict their occurrence to prevent harm to aquatic and human life?

Bloom Finder

Creating a user-friendly web app, then mobile too, which will use NASA data and resources. Its purpose will be to show current bloom in designated by user area and to predict blooms, based on historical data trends analyzed with ML and NN techniques.

GreenTea(m) - BloomFinder

Background

We choose this project because harmful algal blooms is considered a serious issue now. HABs affect aquatic population by killing or poisoning fish which is one of important sources of food especially in the coastal areas that can affect indirectly people health. It can also pollute drinking water. Freshwater resources are crucial for human life on Earth, we are made of water yet this resource is very small amount compering to growing human population, so it have to be protected at all costs.

Also by our BloomFinder app we want to help a single person to make own decisions and choices - private or business one - based on NASA data.


What inspired us to join this challenge was what happened in Lake Erie, one of the most important source of drinking water in U.S and Canada which supplies over 11 million people with water. When it was contaminated with massive blooms which leaded to dramatic shortage in available drinking water resources for that population. It must had to be like you are thirsty and have a water but you can't touch it. This is a dramatic situation should not happen again, so that is why we are looking to find an effective solutions, to predict and warn.


Solution

The BloomFinder app will predict early possible blooms, so actions for securing drinking water resources or for securing directly people to not have contact with bloom during work or tours activities, could be taken. It will also help people to avoid certain areas in certain time based on NASA data.


Achievement and problems:

We started to work with data from NASA's sources like:


We also prototyped BloomFinder web-app interface: please see project Updates

And we were prototyping with multi-layers graphs as well as with single factor graphs: please see project Updates

Here is a link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/kkotlarski/bloomfinder

Here is a link to prototype BloomFinder app: https://quirky-golick-3ca271.netlify.com

Project video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ikwgxlr9wzvsi2i/My Vid...
unfortunately with watermark :(


We have plans to develop our project with further work as:

  1. contacting some NASA specialists and scientists who are interested in our project,
  2. getting access to wider variety of data with help of NASA specialist that will develop our project, and make two things continuing: working over prediction (faster and for longer time in future) of algae blooms, and searching for correlations between blooms and other environmental factors (also some from land areas),
  3. developing the BloomFinder app into mobile.


With our BloomFinder app people will enjoy in healthier life with aquatic source and want lose precious source for food, drinking, work and tourism when they informed about bloom in early stages.


Soft and hardware used:

  • Mackbook Pro
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Git
  • Term 2
  • github.com (code repository)
  • netlify.com (hosting)
  • coastwatch.pfeg.noaa.gov (data source)
  • mapbox.com (map library)
  • React (visualisation library)
  • Recharts (charting library)
  • + a few small utils




Overviewed Resources:

https://data.nasa.gov/

https://nasadata.napszel.com/

https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-8-as-a-tool-for-monitoring-algal-blooms/