I have five app ideas in my notebook for the trees. The trees shouldn't wait on me.
Here they are. Take any.
Build them better than I would have. CC0, no credit needed.
A note before the list. Almost every "tree planting" app is the same map: pins, counters, a feel-good number going up. The interesting work is somewhere else. In survival rates. In transparency. In showing people what they actually have around them and what they are losing. The five sketches below try to push into that gap.
If something like one of these already exists, drop the link in the comments, that's the best possible outcome. The goal here isn't novelty. The goal is open, citizen-facing, forkable tools that anyone can pick up and run. If a closed-source or paywalled version exists, an open alternative is still worth having.
Table Of Contents
- 1. Empty Lot Matchmaking
- 2. AI Tree Doctor
- 3. Neighborhood Carbon Map
- 4. Dead Tree Ledger
- 5. Street View Tree Census
1. Empty Lot Matchmaking — Tinder for would-be planters
One side: people with empty yards, vacant lots, apartment frontage.
Other side: volunteers who want to plant, organizations that donate saplings.
The app matches all three by location. On top of the match, a vision-language layer: based on the lot's climate zone, soil type, sun exposure, and water access, it tells you "these three species will survive here, these two will die without irrigation."
2. AI Tree Doctor — A plant pathologist in your pocket
A user registers a sapling they planted in the app. Every time they walk past it, they take a photo. A vision model reads health from the photo: yellowing leaves, insect damage, water stress, bark wounds. Each photo produces a care card: "water within three days, bark damage on the south side, check it."
3. Neighborhood Carbon Map — The street that carries you
A user draws a 500-meter circle around their home. They mark existing trees one by one, or auto-count them from street imagery (see #5). The app calculates the annual CO2 absorption of those trees and compares it to the user's own carbon footprint.
4. Dead Tree Ledger — A morgue for what we cut
Tree planting events get press. Tree death tracking happens almost nowhere. This app is a ledger for every tree that gets cut, dies of disease, or is destroyed by accident. The user uploads a photo, marks the location, and writes the cause if known.
The system auto-fills the local municipality contact form: "a tree was cut on this street on this date, when will the replacement be announced?"
5. Street View Tree Census — AI excavating the past
A user enters a street or coordinate. The app pulls historical street imagery snapshots (2008, 2012, 2018, 2024, etc.) and runs them through a vision model. The model counts trees per year and produces a loss map: "this street lost 42% of its trees in fifteen years. Here is exactly where they were."
A closing note
These shouldn't sit in a private notebook while trees are being cut down. If you are a developer with a free weekend and a working knowledge of any multimodal model, please pick one and ship it. Do it better than I would have.
If you start building one of these, drop your open-source repo link in the comments. Someone reading will want to collaborate, and this thread can be the meeting point.
In wealthier countries, some of this is partly under control. In much of the world, it isn't. There are people there who feel each cut as their own, organizing through small grassroots networks. If one of these tools lowers their friction even a little, that alone is reason enough.
The earth is our vein. The trees are our blood.
CC0. No credit needed. Just build.
