Often trash cleanups are efforts made on shore, ignoring the masses of garbage floating in the middle of lakes and oceans. This doesn't just look bad, but affects the quality of water and the ecosystem of the body of water. Additionally we decided that algae blooms should be another point of focus due to their potential to spread and destroy ecosystems. These issues are especially prominent in Lake Erie, which was our main focus, having previous occurrences of algae blooms and of course, unwanted trash (it should be alarming that this is so common that it's a given). We wanted to provide the public not only a way to evaluate the magnitude of the problem at hand, but also a platform for them to contribute towards fixing this problem.
The app allows the users to crowdsource information about the current state of a body of water by providing details on locations of unwanted trash or algae blooms along with the severity. The platform we created also serves as an educational tool that informs the public of the actual state that our lakes are in and providing data for others who want to process the data in their own way.
A flask app using html, css, and javascript for the frontend.
Getting the maps and css to work when we had to move files to a static folder.
Getting the Google Maps API to work and getting the Twilio API to work. Also having a finished functional product.
While researching about the great lakes, we found the quality of the lakes were much lower than we expected. This inspired us to create a platform that informed the public about this issue.
A lot of improvements related to user experience as well as a few features to be implemented.