Space Apps Challenge 2018

Try our website now: https://ferry-man.herokuapp.com/

Source code link: Github link to our repo

1. Motivation

The biological kingdom always amazed us with its diversity and surprise. In a context of fast-changing world of climate and environment, we need to predict and prevent the invasions of some threatening species and find new home for endangered ones. On the other hand, assume that you are Voldermort, have you ever wondered if your beloved snake could live happily in other place in the world? Motivated by this, we used global land surface temperature and precipitation from NASA satellite in combination of different species habitat database to plot the region of comfort for different species. Our ultimate goal is to help those species can go on a ferry and reach their dream homes.

2. Details

We hope Ferryman would be a favorite website for all animal lovers and people curious about the biological world. Our website introduces different species with their information and images, showing their current distribution and present their "comfort" temperature and rainfall environment. For a more in-depth analysis, we applied the method of Sutherst and Maywald (1985) to estimate the Ecological Index (EI) which reflects how well the species could live in different locations.

3. Resources

Analyzing data:

MODIS monthly temperature data: https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Global precipitation measurement: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GPM/main/index.html

CABI Invasive Species Compendium: https://www.cabi.org/ISC/

Wikipedia: http://wikipedia.org

Analyzing and web tools:

Python as the main programming tool

Heroku cloud platform: https://dashboard.heroku.com/

Reference paper:

Sutherst, R. Wt, and G. F. Maywald. "A computerised system for matching climates in ecology." Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 13.3-4 (1985): 281-299.

4. The ferrymen

The ferry we hope that can find home for different species have five ferrymen:

Chase Jhih-Huang Shyu

Yu-Hsiang Chien

Utpal Kumar

Jun Su

Nguyen Cong Nghia

For more information about our team, please visit http://iescoders.com