CommuniPlant

Building communities by inciting appreciation for sustainability.

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Inspiration

Growing up in the early 2000s, communiplant's founding team knew what it was like to grow up in vibrant communities, interconnected interpersonal and naturally.

Today's post-covid fragmented society lacks the community and optimism that kept us going. The lack of optimism is especially evident through our climate crisis: an issue that falls outside most individuals loci of control.

That said, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to keep hope for a better future alive, and that future starts on the communal level. Here at Communiplant, we hope to help communities realize the beauty of street-level biodiversity, shepherding the optimism needed for a brighter future.

What it does

Communiplant allows community members to engage with their community while realizing their jurisdiction's potential for sustainable development. Firstly, the communiplant analyzes satellite imagery using machine learning and computer vision models to calculate the community's NDMI vegetation indices. Beyond that, community members can individually contribute to their community on Commuiplant by uploading images of various flora and fauna they see daily in their community. Using computer vision models, our system can label the plantlife uploaded to the system, serving as a mosaic representing the communities biodiversity.

Finally, to further engage with their communities, users can participate in the community through participation in a variety of community events.

How we built it

Communitech is a fullstack web application developed using React & Vite for the frontend, and Django on the backend. We used AWS's cloud suite for relational data storage: storing user records. Beyond that, however, we used AWS to implement the algorithms necessary for the complex categorizations that we needed to make. Namely. we used AWS S3 object storage to maintain our various clusters.

Finally, we used a variety of browser-level apis, including but not limited to the google maps API and the google earth engine API.

Challenges we ran into

While UOttahack6 has been incredibly rewarding, it has not been without it challenges. Namely, we found that attempting to use bleeding-edge new technologies that we had little experience with in conjunction led to a host of technical issues.

First and most significantly, we found it difficult implementing cloud based artificial intelligence workflows for the first time.

We also had a lot of issues with some of the browser-level maps APIs, as we found that the documentation for some of those resources was insufficient for our experience level.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Regardless of the final result, we are happy to have made a final product with a concrete use case that has potential to become major player in the sustainability space.

All in all however, we are mainly proud that through it all we were able to show technical resilience. There were many late night moments where we didn't really see a way out, or where we would have to cut out a significant amount of functionality from our final product. Regardless we pushed though, and those experiences are what we will end up remembering UOttahack for.

What's next for Communiplant

The future is bright for Communplant with many features on the way. Of these, the most significant are related to the mapping functionality. Currently, user inputted flora and fauna live only in a photo album on the community page. Going forwards we hope to have images linked to geographic points, or pins on the map.

Regardless of Communiplant's future actions, however, we will keep our guarantee to support sustainability on all scales.

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