Our inspiration and approach

We are concerned that people in the XXI Century are still dying of starvation and undernourishment and we would like to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger.
The COVID-19 pandemic  threatens the poverty reduction  (ILO, 2020). In fact, in several places around the world, people are choosing between starvation or the risk of catching the virus. The increase of poverty as well as disruption on the food chain which may result in the augmentation of food prices  inspired our team to choose the Food for Thought challenge.

To solve this problem, we are proposing an app having in mind that many people do not have access to the internet and web applications. 

We would like to see a world in which the food chain is more resilient by empowering people to know the type of plants they can grow and how they can do it. Therefore, we thought about creating a mobile application that uses NASA temperature and solar radiation data and other data sources to provide planting information to users according to their geolocation and the season (inputs). The main output is a planting guide with a season calendar and information such as when to plant, amount of water needed, time of sun exposure and nutritional values of food. 

Many people, however, who do not have access to the internet. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU, 2019) , 53.6 percent of the world's population are internet users. In the least developed countries (LDCs), on the other hand, only 19 percent of individuals are online in 2019. In this regard, we came up with the idea to add in the app, a social network platform to connect NGOs (or other civil society) that support vulnerable people and donors. Thus, the latter will be able to get to know the NGOs (projects, evaluation, etc.) which will allow the interaction and donnation according to their own goals.

The project was developed in three steps: i) the problem definition, which included the benchmarking of similar solutions and the identification of the target public; ii) the development of the solution, by evaluating the data needs and availability on NASA EarthData and other data sources, the development of a flowchart, the identification of the inputs and outputs information and the definition of the platform to develop the mobile application; iii) project execution, in which the design of the app and the code structure was developed. Next steps will be to develop the database and the code. A flowchart is presented in our presentation, slide 2 (link available in the next section).

Space agency data

The application will use  the historical NASA data on agroclimatology variables, which will support the definition of which crops are suited for a given input location by crossing these data to a dataset which included zones, the hardiness zone (area in certain climatic conditions to plant) and heat zone (temperature).

Information of the geographical location is an input to POWER (Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources) dataset (NASA) as latitudes and longitudes, retrieving information of climatologic minimal temperature at 2 meters and average temperature at 2 meters to calculate both hardiness zone and heat zone values of the location respectively. These values are crossed with a local database of crops and planting data per zone to inform the user about the best crops to plant in the location defined by the app user.

Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) data are available at:

• https://data.nasa.gov/Earth-Science/Prediction-Of-Worldwide-Energy-Resources-POWER-/wn3p-qsan
• https://power.larc.nasa.gov/data-access-viewer/

Tools, coding languages, hardware, software  used to develop the project

During the development of our project we used some communication tools as Google Docs, Google Drive, Whatsapp and Skype. For the app design and presentation it was used Google Presentation, Canva and Illustrator.

With the design of the app in hand, the project will use Android Studio and Python language to do the back-end programming and access the POWER API to retrieve the data.

Problems and achievements

The main achievement of  the project is the possibility to attend undernourished people by supplying with information and the link of donors to organizations that act closely to donees.  Furthermore, the app informs which plant and how to plant on each specific region.

One of the most important problems was the lack of a complete and standardized database about ideal crop parameters for all crop/ all locations, such as temperature and radiation. There are some datas, mainly in developed countries, but it's necessary to expand this dataset and it will be one of the future proposes of this project.

Another problem found by the team in the development of the project was the lack of time to improve our code and our app, since we just got acquainted of the hackaton on May 30, 11 PM. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GmIVaok0-y-w3I3uq4NTQ7TKaBNv08PL/view?usp=sharing

ILO. (2020). Contagion or starvation, the dilemma facing informal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Labour Organization. Retrieved May 31, 2020, from https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_744005/lang--en/index.htm

ITU. (2019). Measuring Digital Development - Facts and Figures 2019. Retrieved May 31, 2020, fromhttps://itu.foleon.com/itu/measuring-digital-development/home/

FAO. (2017). CHAPTER 1. Fruits and Vegetables: An overview on Socio-Economical and Technical issues. Retrieved May 31, 2020, from http://www.fao.org/3/y4358e/y4358e04.htm

NASA. (2020). Prediction of worldwide energy resources (POWER) | NASA open data Portal. Retrieved May 31, 2020, from https://data.nasa.gov/Earth-Science/Prediction-Of-Worldwide-Energy-Resources-POWER-/wn3p-qsan