Take any of these five app ideas. They're for the trees.

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."

Why it matters

A Smithsonian-led meta-analysis of 176 tropical restoration sites found that on average only half of replanted trees survive five years, with mortality reaching 80% at some sites.

Mostly because of the romantic "anything green" attitude that puts the wrong species in the wrong place. The "how many trees we planted" number is already a lie. The real question is "how many lived." This app inverts that statistic. It turns the planting ritual into something close to science.

---

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."

Why it matters

A planted sapling's survival in the first years depends heavily on continued care, not just on planting quality. Fund4Trees' 2025 evaluation of urban planting in England explicitly calls for ending the "plant and walk away" culture.

People don't come back because they don't know plant pathology and have no feedback loop with that tree. Photo by photo, this app creates a "your tree is talking to you" moment.

---

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.

Why it matters

A mature oak captures around 25 kg of CO2 per year on average (the range is 10-40 kg depending on species and age); a person's annual flight footprint runs into thousands.

Someone who can see how much their street carries them starts thinking differently about urban planning, road widening, and cutting permits. This is not a tree map; it's a "right to the city" tool.

---

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?"

Why it matters

Most municipalities cut tens of thousands of trees a year, and this data is centralized nowhere.

Planting is PR. Cutting is a quiet bureaucratic event. This asymmetry is what makes long-term tree loss invisible. An open, crowdsourced, photo-backed death registry becomes serious pressure on elected officials.

---

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."

Why it matters

Academic teams have started doing satellite-based versions of this—like the Purdue group published in CACM in April 2026 on locating 278 million urban trees.

But none of this is at street level or in a citizen's hand. If a model can walk every street of a city in a few hours and produce a fifteen-year loss map that anyone can pull up by typing their address, that map gives activists and journalists a weapon they didn't have before.

---

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.

Start an Open Source Repo for one of these ideas!

Comments

[tahir]

Going offline for a month. If you're picking up one of these, reply here with what you have or what you're missing. Repo link, dataset, a collaborator gap, plant pathology expertise. Let this comment be the meeting point for the thread

If you think any of these is misguided or already done well, please say so right here. That's the most useful thing anyone can do.

And if one of these matters more where you live than the others; say which, and why. That context is gold for whoever picks it up.