Inspiration
When we think of the earth and all the grows from it, we may find ourselves regarding them with awe and appreciation. However, we realized that an important part of keeping our planet and its ecosystems healthy is identifying and removing natural assailants as well. Invasive plant species are a major environmental concern, as they dominate local ones and take over the habitats of native plants essential to the well-being of local ecosystems. We chose to tackle this problem by crowd-sourcing information and letting people post pictures of plants they find on their day-to-day.
What it does
Our app allows users to upload photos of plants they spot in their daily lives, and allows botanists and other experts to verify whether the plant shown is invasive or not. The app is meant to report the locations of invasive plants to government agencies
How we built it
We used Figma to sketch an initial design; Webflow, a no-code online website builder, to build the website; and Kivy, a Python framework, to create the app.
Challenges we ran into
It turns out it's very tricky to work with images in Kivy! Given our time constraints, we could not add the ability to take photos directly in the app like we had hoped to, as designing layouts and the process of getting and displaying an image alone was more time-consuming than expected.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built a multi-screen app and a pretty website in less than twenty-four hours! We set ourselves a reasonable scope to reduce the pressure we put on ourselves and learned a lot about how quickly we could pick up new frameworks and libraries, as well as how to adjust to the timelines we're given and set realistic goals.
What we learned
Everyone on the team had to learn about Kivy, which is what we used to build an app in Python. We learned about the kv language, which we used to construct widgets that could check our local files, display images, and take user input.
Accessibility
In service of offering an inclusive and accessible app, all images will have alt text. As the interactions are very simple, upvote and downvote, people with cognitive disabilities can use it easily. In addition, the screens are screen-reader compatible.
What's next for Plant Invaders
In the future, we would like to add the ability to take photos directly in the app (as opposed to uploading from the device's local files). We would also like to include a general 'tips & tricks' section to help laypeople identify and remove invasive species. A very distant dream for this project would be to develop the ability to recognize invasive plants so well that drones can be sent into the world to report invasive species sightings.
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