Swamp Spotter

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Inspiration

Many native plant species and ecosystems are struggling to survive due to invasive species taking over and destroying their natural habitat. UF IFAS has multiple research papers about these species demonstrating the destructive impact that they have had since being introduced to the state of Florida. Publicly available information shows that only 33 people in Alachua County are currently out scanning for these plants, with a combined 115.5 man-hours. This app encourages more environmentalists without academic backgrounds to contribute to the field by having a user-friendly interface that prevents information overload. [https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c680af907b69494faf9f5361c4a08c49]

What it does

Swamp Spotter is a mobile web application designed to help users identify, report, and track invasive plant species in Alachua County. The app allows users to: • Discover invasive species in their area

• Take a picture of a plant to identify its species

• Submit reports of invasive plants

• View all reports on an interactive, real-time map

How we built it

We built it using JavaScript and related frameworks like Next.js, Node.js, NextAuth.js.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble implementing user authentication due to some version conflicts with MongoDB. We resolved this issue by switching to Clerk for authentication, and now we have an even better system than what we originally planned for.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the accuracy of pins placed on our map. We're also proud of how nice the user interface looks.

What we learned

We learned how to connect a web application to a MongoDB database, run queries on the database through an API, and display the results in the front end via a leaflet map. We learned how to integrate a Gemini AI agent into a web application, and integrate Clerk into this app for authentication.

What's next for Swamp Spotter

As a community tool, we want to make sure that everyone can use that. To this end, we plan to implement more languages (Spanish, French, Creole, etc.) and more accessibility features, such as speech to text and audio descriptions. We also want to expand this software to cover more counties, and allow for more user customization of the app.