GAIA| A New Perspective

A New Perspective

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protected areas and other forms of wilderness areas (e.g., arboretums, beaches, parks, marine monuments) have been closed worldwide. Your challenge is to lead the effort to examine any potential impacts of reduced human traffic in such local protected natural environments.

The Gaia Project

Summary

Our project proposes a solution to the absence of visitors in Itapuã State Park, a protected area wich is supported by the visiting tickets price. We propose an app in wich the park employees can log in and use their cellphone cameras to capture the environment around them, in photographs or videos. The data gathered by our app will be used to create an online database wich simulates a visit to the park. Thus, citizens can take an online hike and contribute via donations, helping the maitenance of the Park and keeping people "in touch" with nature without breaking the isolation recommendations.

How We Addressed This Challenge

This project was designed to help supress the consequences of the absence of visitors in an specific protected area located in the state that we live in. It adresses the challenge by offering an alternative, both to the park administration to best maneuver the area and the local biodiversity, and the visitors to keep "in touch" with nature.

How We Developed This Project

Our approach to delevoping the project was the knowledge about the Park's situation, due to the fact that some members of our team had already visited the place and knew about it worked, or used to, considering the pandemic's situation. Sadly, we did not use any space agency data in our project. Besides having some trouble findin data, we achieved some resilience by modeling our project along the way, since we started with a different ideia and were guided by our mentors towards the current one.

Project Demo

https://youtu.be/jyaXa7OTxN8

Data & Resources
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.