Aloha Plants

Due to Hawaii’s geographical isolation, the state has high biodiversity with over 10,000 species found nowhere else on earth [2]. However, Hawaiʻi has experienced significant destruction of its dryland forest, with up to 95% destroyed, and only 40% of mesic forest remaining [3].

Hawaiʻi currently imports around 80-90% of its food, costing the state approximately $3 billion annually. However, a 2012 report from the Office of Planning Department of Business and Economic Development and Tourism, in cooperation with the Hawaiʻi State Department of Agriculture, estimated that replacing just 10% of imported foods with locally grown food would keep $313 million dollars in the state economy [1].

If people have the knowledge, they can plant native and canoe plants at their workplaces and homes for food cultivation. This would increase biodiversity and establish strong communities of native plants in urban areas. Cultivation of food, including with canoe and native plants, can also help alleviate Hawaii’s food crisis. Home gardens have a great potential to generate significant amounts of produce. For example, by the end of World War II, 40% of produce in the US was from victory gardens [4].

In order to address this our team (tech for a greener Hawaii) created Aloha Plants which is a web page which includes information about plant species as well as volunteer opportunities to get involved in conservation in Hawaiʻi.

This webpage is a proof of concept that was developed as a group project for an undergraduate software engineering course at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Through this project I learned how to use javascript to build a web application but I also learned how to work with MongoDB (databases). My main focus during this project was to develop the functionality (and then fill out) the plant data for the web page. See screenshot below:

We have prepared a document explaining the webpage in addition there is a link to the source code. This document can be found here: https://tech-for-a-greener-hawaii.github.io/