Javascript

Piedmont Natives Plant Database

jkropko — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 19:02:05 +0000

Piedmont Natives Plant Database

Partner: Thomas Jefferson Soil Conservation District

Problem Definition

Ever since the first settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607, the region and it’s landscape have been modified to meet the needs of it’s new inhabitants. The introduction of new species ( some intentionally and some unintentionally) has a significant impact on the region's fauna and flora. Many interdependencies in the ecosystem are fractured. The result has been reduced biodiversity and ecosystem services. The reduction of pollinators and the endangerment of many species who depend on specific ecosystems have been removed or disconnected. Weakened ecosystems make it easier for non-native and invasive species to outcompete native species. These decreases in native species have a ripple effect in the ecosystem.

Project Proposal

The overall goal for this project is to develop a user-centric tool which will help plant enthusiasts, gardeners, community developers, landscape architects and conservation professionals make informed choices that restore or preserve native ecosystems and aid in keeping invasive species out.

Given the scale of this project and our dependence on volunteer work, we have decided to divide the work into the following stages:

Redesign of the Piedmont native plant database to meet open database standards.
Develop user-centric web based and mobile app to educate users on how to best use native plants as part of a greater ecosystem.
Integration of other resources via API call to facilitate and increase functionality

The 1st part of the project is about updating the database that currently resides here: https://webapps.albemarle.org/nativePlants/default.aspx

There are many reasons why native plants are important for the environment, but it is often overlooked by developers when choosing plants for a property and by individual gardeners when deciding what to plant. The purpose of this database is to provide a tool to make it easier to know what plants are native to an area so that people can more easily take it into consideration when designing their plans for a new or existing area.

Who is the database for? (users)

The public, in general, but especially for:

Developers, land-use engineers, landscape architects, and site plan designers working on residential and commercial development projects
Localities that work with the development community to set requirements for those projects to satisfy code requirements, internal processes, and community interests
Community members who want to install native plants on their own property
Conservation professionals who are working with the public and localities to design best management practice (BMP) to help with conservation projects like meadows, stormwater facilities, such as bioretention, raingardens, stream restoration and buffer projects, greenroofs, greenwalls, etc.
Commercial nurseries to help them better understand and market native plants to increase demand for native plants
General public to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services through widespread landscape restoration
Local farmers and vegetable gardeners in creating looking to improve crop yields by designing and installing plant communities that support native pollinators throughout the year, rather just when their crops are in bloom, examples: wine, apples, stone fruit
Local farmers finding the best lands to grow a specific crop based on existing land conditions, example- wine
Local farmers and vegetable gardeners in designing plant communities that naturally control pests by encouraging parasitoid wasps habitat
Ecologists studying foodweb relationships

Technologies

Project notes

Indoor mapping plan - 2021-09-27 Our plan:

Meeting with Maitri Patel - 2021-09-20 First meeting with Maitri Patel UVa, SoM 2024 -… more

Thurs 12th 8-9pm on zoom - 2021-08-12 Join from 8-9pm aug 12

https://virginia.zoom.us… more

IPFS file storage - 2021-07-30 went through this documentation

https://www.… more

Complete App review and documentation - 2021-07-27 The first solid review done with Visitable.org is… more

First LIDAR test with Visitable.org - 2021-07-20 Working with Visitable.org we're going to compare… more

App Review - 2021-07-20 Getting a spreadsheet going with a comparison of… more

More information about this project https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bJO6z0hnbN7WGUiKAP19q0U6ga3TGeztNwv4U4pxTzU…

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Full Stack Engineer

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 01:09:44 +0000

Full Stack Engineer admin Tue, 03/30/2021 - 21:09

Company

Yay Lunch

Job Description

Like the idea of helping get kids great food instead of helping some bankers make more money? Yeah, so do we. A lot. If you like a lot of politics and hierarchy and meetings, process for process sake, or building and managing empires of direct reports, this is probably the wrong place.

Link to original posting

https://yaylunch.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=79&source=aWQ9NA%3D%3D

Location

Charlottesville

Technologies

Javascript

Python

Database administration

UI/UX

City Streetlights

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 14:25:37 +0000

City Streetlights

Streetlights have a profound impact on the vitality of a city. Good street lighting reduces crime, increases night-time economic activity, and prevents auto accidents. The streetlight network is one of the most large-scale and expensive components of a city’s public infrastructure, and streetlights are a major contributor to a city’s electricity use and carbon footprint.

That raises an important question: how should the city make decisions about how to replace and expand the streetlight network? And what criteria should be used to make these decisions? The lights use a significant amount of energy, so lights can be replaced with energy-efficient bulbs to reduce the city’s carbon footprint. The network can be expanded to bring more light to underserved neighborhoods. Light pollution can be taken into account. And decisions can be made to reduce the cost to city in the short and longterm.

All the data that the city needs to weigh these factors and make good decisions exist, but are currently stored in different places and with different formats. Because the data haven’t been brought together in one unified analytic platform, the city of Charlottesville usually allows the energy company it contracts with to manage the streetlights, Dominion Energy, to make replacements to the streetlights on their own schedule.

This project will tackle the problem of wrangling Charlottesville’s various streetlight data to build a tool that maps the streetlights and displays all the information the city would need to know about each individual streetlight in an intuitive application. This app will include calculators to help the city find the replacement schedules and expansion strategies to minimize the network’s energy use and cost, increase the coverage and quality of the light, and generate greater social equity through expanding in neighborhoods that lack sufficient lighting.

Project Goals and Deliverables:

To wrangle the various data sources from the city and from Dominion to match records and bring all of the information about individual streetlights together in one analytic-ready database.
To develop a web-based application with the streetlight database as a backend, and a front-end that includes the following features:
- A map of the streetlights in Charlottesville
- A clickable interface for viewing the data about specific streetlights, such as the type of bulb and fixture, the age of the bulb, and the quality of the light emitted by the bulb.
- Calculators that display the cost, energy consumption, light quality, and lighting as it correlates to socioeconomic factors in different neighborhoods.
- An interface that allows these calculators to be used to generate a replacement schedule that minimizes cost or energy use, or provides better lighting to underserved neighborhoods.

Design Specifics and Requirements:

The purpose of the tool is to provide outputs for different streetlight replacement scenarios. The tool will have a main menu, from which the user can produce a variety of scenarios. Within each scenario are a set of cards, each showing one or more sets of streetlights that have been selected and considered for replacement by the users. The set of cards comprises the scenario. The outputs for each scenario will show a breakdown of costs (NPV) given particular replacement schedules and discounts. On the main menu, the user can break the entire streetlight catalogue into sets based on location and bulb type (and potentially other characteristics as defined going forward). The sets will be shown on cards where the replacement schedule, new bulb type, and discount rate can be specified. The main menu will both show and keep a count of streetlights that have not been assigned a set yet. At a given time, the user interface indicates which scenario and which card is being edited.

Features of the main menu:

The extent of the main menu will be the city of Charlottesville. Features will include the streetlight locations as points. It will be possible to pan and zoom within the extent, and to return to full extent.
A checkbox menu of bulb types will be available.
A checkbox menu of neighborhoods will be available.
Drawing tools to make rectangular or freeform selections will be available.
When all of a location or bulb type has been selected, it will become grayed on the checkbox.
When a particular streetlight has been selected for a card, it will become grayed out on the map.
A running count of selected and unselected streetlights will be displayed.

Features of the cards:

A card of the selected set of streetlights will show the extent and streetlight points.
The user will be able to select the replacement schedule, discount rate, and bulb type.
The card will display the selection criteria on it (e.g., Rugby Rd & Bulb Type A)
The user can delete the card, such as through an 'x' in a top corner.
The active card (the card being edited) will be visually distinguishable, such as through highlighting around the border of the card.

Features of the outputs:

The output will list the scenarios that are being explored by the user and the computed cost of the scenario.
The active scenario (the scenario being edited) will be visually distinguishable, such as through highlighting around the border.
The user will have a command that copies the scenario (to use as the basis for a new scenario)
The user will have a command that re-runs the scenario, if cards within the scenario are changed.
The user will have a command to create a new scenario that starts with a clean Main Menu and no cards.
Each scenario in the list can be expanded. The expansion shows the selection criteria for each card (e.g , Rugby Rd & Bulb Type A), the replacement schedule, discount rate, and new bulb for each card, and the computed cost for each card. The total cost for the set of cards comprising the scenario is also shown.
The expanded list of scenarios can be exported as a spreadsheet.

Additional features and requirements of the tool:

The tool saves all scenarios. Each time the tool is opened, the user can resume where they left off.
When the user makes a new section, the tool provides an output based on that selection.
If the user has not made a selection, an output is not provided. Message: No streetlights selected.
If no streetlights meet the selection criteria, no output can be generated. Message: No streetlights meet those criteria.
Only a single output (deterministic) can be generated for a given selection.
Outputs must change after the user changes the selection. Message: Working…done.

Tentative working timeline:

December 2020 -- January 2021: formation of the leadership team for this project. Meet with Susan and Kirk to understand the goals of the project. Write a project proposal document.
February 2021: recruit volunteers from the Charlottesville community and UVA to work on the project. Generate a system of project management that allows many volunteers to do meaningful work to help with different parts of the design and coding.
February -- April 2021: regular “hack night” events with the leadership team and volunteers to develop a minimum viable product version of the app
Late spring/summer 2021: working with Susan, Kirk, and other stakeholders to assess how the tool is meeting the needs of key users. Continued work to debug and expand the functionality of the app.

Technologies

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Wage Theft

dm2qy — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 23:29:00 +0000

Wage Theft

Development for a website to educate workers in Virginia about their rights with regard to wage theft, and to help them navigate the official Virginia Department of Labor and Industry process to issue a wage theft complaint.

Technologies

https://github.com/code-for-charlottesville/wagetheft-frontend/blob/master/read…

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