Space Apps Challenge 2017

We are Andurá and we developed NatMachine. NatMachine is an app that relates environmental information, in this case, vegetation coverage index, with the economic development indexes from that area. Our aim is to show the user if a given geographical area can develop economically, particularly in terms of GDP, and keep its vegetation coverage. One such area would probably develop its economic activities in a more sustainable way than others. It works as a time machine showing historical earth photographs obtained in NASA Open Data with the corresponding GDP in the period the picture was taken. Besides the app, we also developed an open web service so the public can access the data we collect and process. We are a small team and we want to improve the interface of the app to highlight the impact of economy on nature. The proposal for the future is to develop a sustainability index for delimited regions based on the economic development, resource usage and environmental changes. One such index could be used as a measure of the impact of resource consumption. Government could be able to evaluate the degradation of the local environment and take action when necessary. We believe such an approach to reduce impact on nature could be used in eventual resource exploration in other planets than Earth.