Native Ecotyped Plant Discovery

[trustpizza]

Addition Idea:

The app is intended to work as such:

1. Moderator creates a new development
2. Users document what they've seen in terms of environmental impact and native habitat destruction based on various 5 point review (stars? who knows yet).
3. People can see the cumulative scores based on those various reviews (not yet figured out)

Problem:

The Average person is pretty dumb, and 50% of them are dumber. They don't know what plants are native, what they look like, etc. I am software engineer, I don't know shit about plants, I'm the 50% here^.

It would be nice if we could have a ruby based API service that based off of the address of a development site (they each have an address in the data model) we could pull native plants with at least this data:
plant: {
plant_name: "",
plant_image_link: "",
plant_characteristics?: (here I'm uncertain, but any useful information in identifying plants so that people can know what to look for)
}

With this we can later build out views so someone can click "native species nearby" or something and see what a local ecosystem should look like.

[blaketeres]

taking a look at this tonight - will see if I can get something with rough edges working

[blaketeres]

found this - docs to the PLANTS API

USDA/USDA-APIs#7 (comment)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B63q9uSv12TbNHJFX3I1VVE5Q2pWZFhtaUk4ZWlLRk5BOGlZ/view?resourcekey=0-Bvm8QpgffadFvBRKIY1qLQ

edit: bleh, it's down. This collection looks promising.

https://www.postman.com/avasond/workspace/usda-natural-resources-conservation-service-plants-database-api/request/17177422-05a12343-3f23-4bb5-b291-26497d7e7e09

[blaketeres]

It seems this data is not readily available with the granularity we need. There are a handful of native plant databases, but none have documented API access.

I have some ideas, and I think it involves doing a bit of cross referencing results across the different databases.

[trustpizza]

What are your thoughts on this:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers

Seems like a cool open sauce solution

[blaketeres]

It does! I'll check it out