briannata / feather

Our app, Feather, allows users to take photos of birds nearby and upload them to a global feed where other nature and bird lovers can admire their beautiful pictures.

feather

where birds of a feather flock together

Inspiration

We were inspired by ornithology, the study of birds, and the compelling need for more data in that field. Scientists found that studying bird migration can be linked to the health of the environment and its ecosystems. They are working on creating machine-learning models to analyze and predict bird behavior and its effects on the environment.

What it does

Our app, Feather, allows users to take photos of birds nearby and upload them to a global feed where other nature and bird lovers can admire their beautiful pictures. This data would be parsed and sent to researchers to improve their machine-learning models. We have a login and registration system so each user can uniquely identify themselves with a username. They can also post more information on their profile page if they would like. We also included an Encyclopedia page where users can learn more about different species of birds.

How we built it

We built our app using React Native, with a primary focus on iOS users. We tested and demoed this app using Expo. We used Cornell's eBird API to gather bird data for the general information and details on each bird species displayed on our Encyclopedia page.

What's next for Feather

In the future, we would expand our app to include videos and audio of birds so that researchers can also gather bird song data and other behavioral traits to study. We also wanted to implement AI models to identify the birds in the user's media so we could identify the species and tell the user more about this bird. We may explore options to personalize your feed so that you can follow specific users whose posts you would like to see more of. In general, we aim to improve the usability and stability of our project so it can be extended to many other use cases.

Check out our devpost here!