Trick-or-Tree

Inspiration

We are a couple with two kids. While we enjoy outdoors and love trees, we don't know the first thing about any trees. We think this would be a great opportunity for us to learn more about the trees around us together as a family, and we hope our project can help others do the same.

What it does

Trick-or-Tree is a hybrid of scavenger hunt, tree identification, and education. In addition to having easy access to information about the champion trees in Alabama, the users can also find targets from a user-defined list of trees, and answer some guided questions to learn about the specifics of the target tree. Once the users correctly recognize the unique features of the target, they will be awarded a badge! It's an app that you can use outdoors, to make your afternoon stroll more interesting and educational; and it's an app that you can use at home to learn about the AL champion trees and the trees with which you've earned badges.

How we built it

We scrapped the AL champion tree data from the Alabama Forestry Commission, and supplement the table with images and facts from the leafsnap database and Wikipedia. The data cleaning and aggregation were done using python with packages such as pandas and geopandas. The web app was developed using a combination of React.js, node.js, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Leaflet.js.

Challenges we ran into

Doing the hackathon through the week was certainly, with two kids and other work responsibilities, there is very limited time to develop UI/UX for a web app. Data cleaning and aggregation were also challenging due to the inhomogeneity of different data sources. Being almost a complete novice in trees and biology was also challenging, but overall it was a very fun and rewarding experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our idea and the results. The app achieved our goal of being user-friendly, our 7-year-old son certainly seemed to understand the gist of it. Also, we were able to do a field test of the app at the Huntsville Botanical Garden and we are proud of the results -- it proved to be quite an interesting and informative trip.

What we learned

Trees, where to find trees, and how to identify trees.

What's next for Trick-or-tree

One thing that's currently missing in our web app is the in-depth knowledge of the genetic information of different trees. We have already collected gene and genome datasets for different species in our AL champion tree list. We plan to learn more about the genome of different tree species and Also, we think the web app can be of use to educators in many different topics. We plan to expand the back-end functionality to make creating a custom list a breeze for anyone, after which we will reach out to local teachers, botanical garden, and museum staff, and hopefully our product would bring joy and knowledge to many people.

Built With

• css
• geopandas
• html
• javascript
• leaflet.js
• node.js
• python
• react.js