🏆 Hackathon: Calgary Hacks 2025
Category: Wildlife Conservation in the Context of Climate Change
Climate change is rapidly threatening wildlife populations worldwide. Many species are at risk of extinction, yet public awareness remains low. We wanted to create a simple, AI-driven tool that allows users to identify animals and learn about their conservation status.
- Users upload an image of an animal
- OpenAI’s GPT-4 Vision model analyzes the image and returns the species name
- (Future Feature) The app will display extinction risk, population trends, and climate impact data
- Frontend: React + Vite + Tailwind CSS
- Backend: Flask + OpenAI API for image recognition
- Development Environment: Running React (
npm run dev) and Flask (flask --app run) concurrently
- We built this from scratch! Before this class, we had zero experience with React, Flask, or APIs.
- Live AI-powered image recognition in a lightweight web app.
- Future potential: With conservation data integration, this could be a valuable tool for researchers and the public alike.
- API integration hurdles: Parsing image data correctly to OpenAI's API
- Frontend-backend communication: Setting up CORS and handling file uploads
- Learning curve: We had to learn React, Flask, and backend logic on the fly
- 🔍 Integration with wildlife databases to provide conservation status
- 📊 Data visualization to display population decline trends
- 📱 Mobile-friendly UI for broader accessibility
✅ Idea: Addresses conservation education through AI-powered species recognition
✅ Implementation: Fully functional AI-based image classification within a short timeframe
✅ Design & Presentation: A clean, intuitive UI built with React + Tailwind CSS