I'm a Visiting Scientist at UC Berkeley focusing on AI for ecology.
Always great to see fellow technologists in this space!
For the past few years I've maintained a free open source project called Ecodash (https://ecodash.ai) covering the world's native plants, with trait filters.
Code here: https://github.com/legel/ecodash
While I'm also an entrepreneur and *do* believe there is a lot of financial opportunity in this space, I also really just want to see ecosystems thrive.
Keep up the great work!
It’s so nice to know you’ve worked on this. I’m very curious what sources you used.
The most fun I had with Indigene was when I decided to add French ecoregions so my parents could use the app too. Most of the work is in this PR where I used a recently published study’s plant host species data to offer ecosystem value/services metrics since the Tallamy data doesn’t cover that: https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene/pull/53
That stuff reignitated the kind of deep data hunt fever I haven’t had since my COVID Tracking Project days when I was finding random ArcGIS dashboards and extracting data from their JSON calls to find some reliable case data.
I’m bummed I didn’t find your project before. I kept looking for something when I moved from Florida to Washington after converting my entire yard there. Having to learn a whole new ecoregion was rough and it made me think the barrier should be drastically lower for people who aren’t as motivated.
On the financial opportunity side, I hoped for a while that there may be a way to align our best interest as a species (and our ecosystem) with what our modern societies value but the last decade has made it clear to me that neither governments nor private enterprise are capable to remain as focused as they need to be. Plus leveraging worldwide public-funded science to make a living seems a bit odd if I can instead use my engineering expertise to not require unnecessary waste of resources (servers, more LLM tokens, etc.) as the ecosystem rapidly degrades.