Pink is new green: How Bengaluru techie devised ‘cherry blossom’ style tree tracker to locate rosy trumpet trees in city

Mohammed said that he got the idea for blrbloom.com based on the idea of how Japanese cherry blossoms are tracked and celebrated across Japan. “They also have extensive mapping of how they are blooming, and when they are going to happen, and have a recurring forecast which keeps changing…..there are also different tracking websites for Japan, which gave us the concept that tracking can be done in stages,” he mentioned.

Mohammed, who has been working in the product design field for a decade, said he does not come from a coding background, though he does understand the fundamentals of it. To get around the unfamiliarity with code writing, he said, “The programming part and heavy lifting were done with AI tools. I have enough technical knowledge to guide the tools – I can read the code to understand to an extent, but not to write it.”

The core data in the interactive website comes from data already stored by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) earlier, and the application takes interactivity a step further by showing the stage of bloom that the tree is currently in. The community can also engage directly with it by adding to the database alongside images of undocumented trees.  Surprisingly, a few people outside Bengaluru have also added markers.

Faris said, “If there is a tree inside a society that is not mapped, they can add a new bloom icon with the number of trees and upload an image marking the blooming state.”

As far as maintaining the existing site is concerned, Mohammed is mainly concerned with optimising server storage for better website performance. He also has ideas for how it can be taken forward, adding, “The BBMP database is exhaustive, where around 7,00,000 datapoints consisting of different varieties of trees are there with census data……I plan to scale it after fleshing out how I want to do so.”