Zoohackathon: Responsibuyer

The purpose of this app is to help increase awareness of illegal or harmful products you may find when going on vacation.

This application was developed on October 8th, 2016 for the Zoohackathon.

Our app is live at http://responsibuyer.blueb.org:5000/. You can also check out our application in action below:

Challenge and Approach

Our submission is for Challenge #7. Decrease Purchase of Illegal Wildlife Products.

Our approach for satisfying this challenge was to:

• Create an easy to access site for searching based on destination
• Provide examples of known products that have a negative impact on native wildlife
• Allow users to look further into the products and the impact had on wildlife populations

Going forward, we want to implement the following features to make Responsibuyer more helpful to our users and help promote conservation efforts of animals being poached:

• Allow users to upload images of examples of products promoting illegal poaching of endangered species
• Show users a list of local businesses that support local conservation efforts
• Allow users to input a travel itinerary with a list of destinations
• Show users ads for non-profits supporting conservation efforts on our list of goods and services to avoid to donate a portion of proceeds to charities fighting illegal poaching

Team Members

Our team is comprised of:

• @bonecrushereb - Benjamin Nolan
• @florean - Nathan Florea
• @handigarde - Ryan Handy
• @Jaemu - Jill Handy
• @wshelor - Will Shelor
• @mfm24 - Matt Murfitt

Technologies, APIs, and Datasets Utilized

We made use of:

• Flask application for serving data
• Postgres backend for storage
• IUCN Redlist API for information on endangered species
• Wildlife trade tracker for information on harmful products
• Wikipedia for animal descriptions

Contributing

In order to build and run our app:

1. Clone the repository
2. Build database on docs/schema.sql
3. Unzip data/responsibuyer.sql.gz
4. psql responsibuyer < responsibuyer.sql to populate the database
5. python main.py to start the webserver

Our code is licensed under the Apache License. Pull requests will be accepted to this repo, pending review and approval.