Treebee

home
tree profile

Inspiration

We see trees everywhere, and trees are pretty much like humans - existing in this world, having life and each one of them is purely unique. So we struck upon this thought that if every human has their own identity, which provides them the law, the protection and of course the ultimate identity and sense of belonging, why couldn't such a thing be done for trees and plants? Also, having a proper database of trees would in turn would help to track environmental crisis records and would also enforce rules in a much better way. That's how we came up with the project Treebee, inspired from the sound of Tree-DB.

What it does

Treebee lets users crowdsource and create a database of trees around them, which with collective efforts would create an overall data, just like how Google uses crowdsourcing to make their maps better, our plan is similar. The trees appear on a map, with custom markers. Looking at the markers, the users can figure out if the tree is adopted by some human already or not. If not, they can adopt the tree, which means they take the responsibility to take care after that tree, just like their pet. Also while putting a new trees data in the app, the user can give that tree a cute name, upload its photo and should be present at the spot to upload its exact position. The trees have a profile of their own, which appears when someone taps on their marker in the map. A user can see what trees they've adopted and if they feel its too much or if they're relocating, they can drop a few trees. That's what the whole concept of our app revolves around.

How we built it

We built the application using flutter framework. Our target platform was Android mobiles, and we sought flutter to be our best bet for the same. We then got our APIs for Google Maps Platform enabled through the cloud console, and integrated them in our app using flutter's awesome Google Maps Platform package. We customised the app according to our needs, used firebase and firestore to carry out authentication and storing user and trees data.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a couple of challenges. It was our first time working with Google Maps Platform so we had to find our way through it. Moreover, we got some dependency issues in flutter while trying to use all the required packages together, which took us a while to solve. Also, the idea we were working with was kinda new so we had to ensure it makes proper sense.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we could complete the project in time, and we designed it in such a way that it follows the scalability principles of Google Maps and focusing on crowdsourcing, which is very essential for such kinda apps.

What we learned

We learnt a lot about Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud in general, about the ease of their usage and power that they hold. We also learnt how to integrate Google Maps in flutter apps and make them stand out!

What's next for Treebee

We would want to make the crowdsourcing part more automated and accurate, and would also want to filter out spam entries somehow. Moreover, we would love to devise something so that creating a proper database would seem more accessible as compared to the current method. We would also want to customize the map more to fit the theme completely.