Eco-Location

This design project for client Tim Wilkinson at the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre explored ways that city dwellers can have their attention drawn to critical eco-systems.

Design brief:

Wildlife and critical ecosystems around the world include over 230,000 legal "protected areas", ranging in size from Coldham's Common in Cambridge https://protectedplanet.net/555561770 to the Serengeti https://protectedplanet.net/555570276. Many people from tourists to researchers and conservationists need to know about these, but there is no quick way to find out whether you are near one. If one is nearby, what can be found there? Barren scrubland or dense forest? Could a park manager see evidence of agriculture where there shouldn’t be, or a visiting scientist learn that the area has been flooded? Your task is to build a mobile application that enables the user to quickly orientate themselves with nearby protected areas, and deliver contextual data by accessing other services. You should specifically include data from the European Space Agencies Global Land Cover Layer to show the percentage of cover types within the protected area (e.g. 40% Mosaic vegetation, 60% Mosaic grassland), and you may include other information such as geolocated photos from Flickr, or species from the IUCN red list of threatened species.

Undergraduate group design projects