A Pokédex-style field guide to the trees on Vanderbilt's campus. Find a tree, photograph it and log where it is to unlock its entry.
- When
- 2026
- Context
- Personal project, Vanderbilt
- Status
- Live; v2 in progress
- Technical summary
- A mobile web app (React, Express, Supabase) for collecting and identifying the trees of Vanderbilt's arboretum, built on real data from Vanderbilt's tree database.
- Topics
What it is
Vanderbilt’s campus is a certified arboretum, with hundreds of tree species. ArborDex turns learning them into a collecting game. Every species is listed, but the ones you haven’t found yet stay locked (?????????) until you go outside, find the tree, and log it with a photo and its location.
A Professor Mode unlocks everything for browsing and planning.
What I did
I designed and built the whole app: the frontend, the API, the database and the deployment. It began as an app inside my desktop-simulator site, and I then rebuilt it as its own mobile web app.
- The species list is real data, gathered from Vanderbilt’s own arboretum tree database
- Sightings are pinned on a campus map
- Photos can get a suggested species from the Pl@ntNet plant-identification service
- An identification key asks questions about the tree in front of you (leaves, bark, twigs, fruit) and narrows 361 species down to a match
How it works
- Frontend: React, TypeScript and Vite, installable on a phone as a web app
- Map: Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles
- Backend: Node/Express API
- Data: Supabase for accounts, the sightings database and photo storage
- Hosting: Vercel
Status
Live at arbordex.app. A second version is in progress: a map-first game where you commit to an ID for each tree and find out the next morning, in a daily field report, whether you were right. Answers are checked against Vanderbilt’s real tree inventory.