Background
Canada makes an average of $6 billion annually from the fishing industry, making it our second-largest food export. New regulations are set in Ontario to raise depleting populations to bring them back to healthy levels. Reports from a 2020 survey show that an estimated 1.15 million anglers (fishermen who fish with a hook or a line) spend about 15.6 million days fishing and about $1.74 billion on consumables and investments wholly attributable to fishing. Overfishing is a serious and ongoing threat to Canada as it has a big impact on Canada’s economy, climate change, ocean health, and biodiversity loss.
Objective
In order to spread awareness and understanding of the effects of overfishing, we created an app that can show areas of overfishing and what areas have been endangered, for those who are interested in recreational hobbies and professional sellers.
How we built it
We built the backend database using a data set from the Ontario Government data portal to show the areas of fish sanctuaries and waterbodies that have regulations set on fishing. The front-end was built on Python libraries and the React framework. We used Selenium for the web-scraping to find the bodies of water and the restrictions for each of them. We used Folium, an interactive map UI to display the user's location and locations of relevant bodies of water. Lastly, we used psycopg2 in order to make our SQL queries to our database, from Python.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges that we ran into were finding a dataset that included all the information that we wanted (bodies of water, coordinates, fishing allowed, restrictions, etc.). We also ran into some challenges while web-scraping and writing the database queries.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Given the short time that we were provided, we were able to successfully collaborate in order to brainstorm an idea that is truly relevant to the province of Ontario, and were able to produce a product that is functioning. Additionally, we were able to build on our initial plans, and further enhance our product, although there is more that we intend to do if we were given more time.
What we learned
Through our time working on this project, we learned what the Folium library is and how we can use it in presenting our interactive map. We also learned how to create database queries, and were able to make use of real data, and utilize it for a practical reason.
What's next for EcoCatch
For our next steps for EcoCatch, we want to be able to improve our user interface, and how we present our findings to our users. We intended to do this as well, but we did not have enough time to implement this part of our project as well.
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