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Jess Lee Subscriber for The DEV Team

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Building a Healthier Planet with Open Source Software

Happy Earth Day, one and all 🌍

Each year on Earth Day (April 22), our team takes a moment to pause and think about our individual and collective impact on the planet we all share with one another — and the flora and fauna that call Earth home.

Today, we also celebrate Sloan the Three-Toed Sloth: our beloved mascot, part-time community moderator, and publisher of anonymous posts here on DEV. If you ever want to post something but don't necessarily want your name attached, Sloan is your gal. That's a lot of responsibility for a mammal that moves at 0.24 km/h (0.15 mph)!

Sloths like Sloan typically live in the lowland, tropical jungles of Central and South America — so we're pretty grateful that she spends so much time hanging out with us on DEV.


This year, we asked Sloan how she wanted to celebrate Earth Day. She's still recovering from the exertion of our 2020 celebration (featuring an interview with Dr. Rebecca Cliffe, one of the world’s leading experts on sloths!) So today, she asked us to pass the microphone to our community...


Sloan's request: Share your favorite open source projects that benefit the environment in the comments below

Sloan knows that software developers can have a meaningful impact on the world we live in. Nothing demonstrates that more strongly than the commitment of the open source community to share knowledge freely and improve codebases with wide technical input. There are so many open source projects that exist to serve the environment, and many of them are actively seeking contributors like you!

A few of our favorite environmental open source projects include...

  • Rainforest Connection (RFCx) — A non-profit tech startup building scalable, open source solutions to illegal logging, poaching, and environmental threats.
  • Trends.earth — a QGIS plugin that supports monitoring of land change, including changes in productivity, land cover, and soil organic carbon.
  • Awesome Earth - A bank of resources, services, products, and ideas that help fight the negative impact of climate change.

Plus, the winners of our Hack the Planet contest with New Relic built some pretty incredible tools including...

  • A website that uses open data to demonstrate the effect of climate change in Peru
  • An app that uses historical weather data to show today's average temperature in your city
  • A tool that rewards users for educating themselves on the climate crisis through Spotify podcasts

What about you? What are your favorite sustainability/climate change-focused open source projects? How can the DEV Community contribute?


💚 With Earth Day love from Sloan and the DEV team

Top comments (10)

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graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her) • Edited

Happy Earth Day, everyone! Thanks for all you do, @sloan !

I have to add the Open Sustainable Technology Project, which lists worldwide open technology projects preserving a stable climate, energy supply, and important natural resources.

GitHub logo protontypes / open-sustainable-technology

Listing of worldwide open technology projects preserving a stable climate, energy supply and vital natural resources. https://opensustain.tech/

Open Sustainable Technology

A curated list of open technology projects to sustain a stable climate, energy supply, and vital natural resources.

"True sustainability is open." - protontypes

Our ambition is to list all sustainable, open and actively maintained technology projects worldwide. Your contribution is necessary to keep this list alive, increase the quality and to expand it. Read more about its origin and how you can participate in the contribution guide, community chat, presentation slides and related blog post. Please contact us to give feedback, hints and ideas for OpenSustain.tech or create an issue.

Contents

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Sloan, the sloth mascot
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darkterminal profile image
Imam Ali Mustofa

deep and dope!

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thesanjeevsharma profile image
Sanjeev Sharma

Happy Earth Day 🌏💚

Hey Sloan,
How do you stay updated on the climate change news? Go to different sources to read some articles?

Don't worry, I got your back. 🤘
Recently, I made this small web app that can get you all the news for climate change from all the sources. 👌 Oh! if you're too busy with work at DEV, you can save those articles too. 😉

Link: polrr.news
GitHub: github.com/thesanjeevsharma/polrr

How can DEV Community contribute?
Well, I am looking for a new job 😁 Maybe, you can refer me lol 😂
Me getting a good job = more time for OSS projects

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alissonsteffens profile image
Alisson Steffens

I just joined this awesome project called CASSIE.

It's an open-source web tool for automatic shoreline mapping and analysis using satellite imagery.

GitHub logo lia-univali / cassie

An open-source web tool for automatic shoreline mapping and analysis using satellite imagery.

CASSIE – Coastal Analysis via Satellite Imagery Engine

Cassie is an open source web tool that performs analysis and mapping of coastal regions, focusing on the variation of the coastline. To perform these procedures cassie uses the tools and images provided by the Google Earth Engine platform.

Satellite image collections

Collection Mission Product Period Cycle (days) Resolution (m) Fallback
Landsat Landsat 5 (TM) SR 1984-2013 15 30 -
Landsat Landsat 7 (ETM+) SR 1999-present 15 30 Landsat 7 T2
Landsat Landsat 8 (OLI) SR 2013-present 15 30 Landsat 8 T2
Sentinel Sentinel 2 (MSI) TOA 2015-present 5 10 -

Usage

First navigate to cassiengine.com/ then click on Access the tool button.

Cassie uses Google authentication to identify their user and allow the use of the Earth Engine. Before starting make sure that your account is registered on the GEE platform. If you are not registered on Earth Engine, Sign Up

You can learn more at
cassie-git-develop-lia-univali.ver...

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downey profile image
Tim Downey

This isn't an open source project (though they do discuss how it's built with OSS software), but I've always found this solar powered website to be a pretty cool proof-of-concept:

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/...

Some of the techniques are a little over the top in my opinion (like dithered images), but I appreciate the mindset and for this particular site they suit its aesthetic.

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rbusche profile image
Rüdiger Busche

Bloom was a great effort for more transparent carbon footprint calculation. Unfortunately, I just discovered that the repository was archived.
I build a transparency-first carbon-footprint calculator
github.com/JarnoRFB/planted-co2-ca... on top of it. For now some values apply only to Germany, but I want to include data for other countries in the future. Let's continue to make carbon footprint estimation for transparent together in the open source community.

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williamcardoso profile image
William Cunha Cardoso • Edited

as search engine I use Ecosia, which uses the ad to plant trees.

ecosia.org/

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sergeyie profile image
Sergey Ieffe

Websites like this one should have a greater future and more detailed charts to encourage web designers for new sustainable approach and design trends.

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graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her)

Ooh this is awesome. Thank you for sharing!