From the Ground Up explores the current landscape of plant data presently available to potential growers with the aim of fostering participation, curiosity, and confidence in applying plant data.

The project explores data aggregated from Plants for a Future, the USDA PLANTS Database, and the National Gardening Association to invite users to identify plant cultivation needs and practical uses that fit their needs.

The visualizations focus on representing use cases most relevant to urban farming in New York City, prioritizing data for plants that grow successfully in temperate climate zones.

Users can filter data for more than 7,000 plants based on plant needs, plant tolerances, and aggregated consumable uses.

The visualizations further connect to other online resources and provide information to enable users’ self-education and encourage in-person connection and continued participation in sustainable food growing practices in their communities and at home.

From the Ground Up aims to make plant research more exciting and accessible to larger communities and to implement modern data practices within collective horticultural knowledge.

This project aims to prioritize horticultural education in a scalable, accessible way while encouraging users to talk to gardeners in their communities.

By providing beginner gardeners tools to better understand what is likely to grow successfully, the impact of home, community, and public gardens on local food systems could be better understood and supported.

Building out this project involved lengthy data cleanup using <div clssql, regex, and javascript. The interactivity was implemented using Vue.js and the visualizations were constructed using D3.js.

From the Ground Up was developed and launched to meet the thesis and project requirements to complete a graduate degree within the Master’s of Science in Data Vizualization (MSDV) program at Parsons at The New School.