Background

Deforestation is one of the major reasons behind climate change which is leading to warmer planets. The rate of decreasing tropical forest is increasing every year. According to World Resource Institute, tropical tree cover loss is now causing more emissions every year than 85 million cars over those cars’ entire lifetime. It would be impossible to bring the temperature down to cool the planet at this rate. Now-a-days, there are a lot of events taking all over the world in every country talking about the importance of tree plantation. Still, the situation is not improving by that much. One major issue is that tree plants need to be taken care of after the plantation as well. We are inspired to work on that problem to help deforestation rate slows down. This project is built to help people understand in which areas the deforestation rate is high and also how to help bringing back the forestland equal to the 1990’s era which will also help bringing back the eco-system.

Solution

We are proposing a sustainable solution for replantation using a business model while the customer segment is mass people. As a result, it will help to reduce global warming and cool the planet. Although there are many analysis on ‘Warming Planets: Cool Ideas’, we have come up with a sustainable idea that can be a potential solution for this issue. Using the Nasa data we created a website where we analyze the condition of the world in terms of deforestation as well as predict the total amount of forestland in future years and make people aware of change in forestland and climate. Furthermore, to gain a sustainable solution regarding this issue our online store will provide customers plants to buy as well as to donate for plantation. To make sure the customers will be engaged with the plantation program, we have created a business model. The customers will buy a tree and will be responsible for maintaining the trees. He has to water the tree on time and take other cares, but he may not be there to take care of the trees. To solve that, we are going to provide a virtual tree which will help the user to track his tree progress. He can water the plants using coins which he can buy from our website. Also, he can get back the fruits or flowers from his tree once it reaches that stage. If the user wants, he can sell the fruits as well. In addition, he can compete globally as well as with his friends to maintain higher number of trees. In this way, the customer will be attracted to visit the website more for maintaining the trees and we can make sure that the trees are taken care of and they will survive. Fruit plants will help us solving the imbalance of ecosystem.

Resources

We have used NASA open dataset which contains total burned areas as well as burning areas of tropical deforestation. Also, we merged this with another dataset from UN to find out the forestland of the countries. We used python programming language, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Flask to build a website. Also, Tableau was integrated into the website to provide clear visualization. We used GitHub to compile all of our work as well as to keep track of the progress. We have created another website to show a demo where user can interact easily using Jimdo website builder. Also, the mentors at our venue gave some valuable suggestion.

Future Works

We will work on this project to improve further even after space apps challenge. Currently, we focused only on Indonesia to analysis and visualize data. We will extend the list of countries to cover more regions. Availability of more data will help us cover more topics related with deforestation such as biomass, carbon emission and others. Some more additional features can be added to the online store to attract the customers. We also will implement IoT to make sure the user can have a live monitoring system to track his trees.

Demo

Github: https://github.com/sheikhhanif/nasa_app_challenge

Details demo and description of our project can be found here in video format

Tags

#deforestation, #machine learning, #python, #JavaScript, #Flask, #burning forest, #indonesia, #warming planets cool ideas, #living in the world