Photo Courtesy: Abhishek Gupta

Recently, NASA Space App Challenge has been successfully completed. It is an annual event held in more than 150 cities around the world. In this app challenge participants are given themes and based on the themes they have to build their product in 2 days.

This year, two teams from DWIT had Participated in the competition and showed their talent but unfortunately their talent was not enough to win the competition. Now they have more experience and spirit to win next year’s competition.

In this App Challenge, team FiveFist built a web based app F2MS (Forest Monitor and Mapping System). Abishek Gupta, the team leader said , “Out of many themes given by NASA, this was the theme under earth specific challenge, which my team felt that can be completed in given time limit so we took this challenge. We found some data through our research and we had to visualize it in some graphical fashion, so we thought of using global map”.

Challenge of Idea:

They had to create such a platform in which user could view the data through cloud source. Here, the main problem they had was: people in overall know about deforestation but actually they do not know specific reason of deforestation, area of deforestation and updates about deforestation. If local people updated about the deforestation in their area then it would be easy to control deforestation for government and other different organizations. They could take quick actions based on the information provided by local people in that specific region, which would help to control the rate and intensity of deforestation.

The application had four major features:

Deforestation Activity:

[caption id="attachment_6320" align="aligncenter" width="1220"] An interface where a user can post about the deforestation activity[/caption]

Under this feature, the 5 main causes of deforestation as per the data has provided i.e. Natural Calamities, Physical Degrades, Chemical Degrades, Fuel Consumption have been listed. User has to select a category and post over there. For example: if deforestation is being done for fuel then thwe user has to choose Fuel Consumption and post in that category. Based on area, category, regions users can post the pictures and comments as well.

Graphical:

[caption id="attachment_6319" align="aligncenter" width="773"] Representation of different geographical regions of Nepal[/caption]

The data has been visualized with the help of different graphical tools. You can view a specific country and its location in the Map. If you click Nepal in the map then the data will be displayed in the graphical form representing different with high deforestation rate. This feature just makes it easier to visualize the data.

Table:

[caption id="attachment_6321" align="aligncenter" width="886"] Tabular representation of data[/caption]

The available data is presented in a tabular form in order to gain information in detail regarding the deforestation activities of global region. The given data set can also be used for other research and analysis purpose.

Prediction:

[caption id="attachment_6322" align="aligncenter" width="895"] Representation of countries in the world map and their detailed information[/caption]

This is the main feature of this application. Base on the current data available, future trend of deforestation can be predicted in this application. Second order polynomial regression has been used for the calculation of future trend. Adding to this feature, Gupta said that, “We have read this in our book and here we were able to use our study. By this feature judges were impressed too.”