A system to protect the regional biodiversity in your own garden
The decline in biodiversity has increased rapidly in recent decades. The reasons for this are, among others, intensive agriculture, the destruction of habitats through land sealing and urbanization and the progressive warming of the earth. The problem of insect mortality is particularly high and puts entire ecosystems out of balance, the effects of which we humans only notice when it is already too late to do anything about it.
Private gardens and public green spaces represent an often untapped potential to counteract this. LYS was developed to help people protect regional biodiversity in their own gardens or balconies by creating a natural bed of native wild plants that provide habitat and food for (endangered) animals and plants. The system measures the site conditions (temperature, light, pH value, soil humidity) in a bed for seven days, helps to select suitable plants and provides care tips and further information on natural gardening. The plants can then be ordered or picked up from specialized nurseries via an integrated shop system. In addition, users can identify species using the integrated photo recognition feature. A voluntary observation report based on this for citizen science purposes is also conceivable.
| University | Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences Interactive Media Design |
| Type of project | Bachelor Thesis |
| Maker(s) | Silvio Lepszy Sarah Lerch |
Extra information
The system consists of two parts: An IoT device called “LYS Stick” that measures site conditions and a smartphone app to capture the collected data and provide the functionality described above.