Habit Alert

Habit Alert

Inspiration

We live in a world where most people feel disconnected from nature. We built HabitatAlert because conservation starts with awareness, and awareness starts with looking up. We wanted to create a way for people to feel genuinely connected to the wildlife around them and to each other through a shared mission of protecting it.

What it does

HabitatAlert is a citizen conservation platform where users report wildlife sightings, pollution, and environmental threats. Reports are pinned to a live global map, species data is pulled from GBIF, and users earn conservation points for contributing, with a global leaderboard to track points.

How we built it

We built it as a JS and HTML web app on vscode with a Supabase backend for real-time data, authentication, and photo storage. The interactive map runs on a Mapbox API, species lookup uses the GBIF API, and the UI is fully custom with CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the IUCN Red List API proved difficult as their v4 API is still in limited access. We pivoted to GBIF which ended up being faster and more reliable. Getting real-time map pins to sync across devices was also tricky but rewarding once it worked.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some accomplishments we're proud of are live reports appearing as pins on the map in real time across multiple devices. The full report-to-leaderboard pipeline working end to end, photo upload, species logging, points awarded, leaderboard updated.

What we learned

We all learned how to build a full-stack website collaboratively using VS Code Live Share, how to work with geolocation and map APIs, and how to scope features and work effectively.

What's next for Habit Alert

Next for HabitatAlert, we would want to implement an AI-powered species identification from photos, integration with official conservation databases, ranger alert systems for suspicious activity reports, and a mobile app. This will create a larger impact as it will be able to be used to identify data patterns and help analyze trends.