Protect Earth

• Climate Action

• Reforestation

• REST APIs

Protect Earth CIO is a reforestation charity in the United Kingdom, who plant trees all over the country. They work with existing land owners to help reforest bits of unused or degraded farmland, and seek non-traditional funding sources for getting it done quicker.

Their funding partners required documentation of each and every sapling planted, so we build a custom iOS app to take the photo, and knocked up a quick Airtable solution to record the GPS coordinates, and species data. We got that going quickly in 2021, and built out a simple API so their funding partners could pull the trees into their database.

It was quick and dirty, but it got the job done, and meant Protect Earth could focus on planting trees 4,500 trees that year.

In 2021 there were 20,000 trees being planted, so we helped make sure the iOS application was even more efficient, reducing the “time per tree” from 8 seconds to 4, allowing the team to document 2,000 trees per day.

At this point the Airtable-based system was starting to groan, so mid-2022 we replaced Airtable with Laravel Nova, and got the iOS application posting directly to an improved version of their API which is no longer read-only. This has gone off without a hitch, and has drastically sped up the Upload Queue functionality. It’s even resulted in fewer trees with missing photos, which means more money in the pocket of the charity.

From here on out we focus on efficiency of the time per tree, API interactions, and making sure the GPS doesn’t keep putting trees in the ocean.