title: Tree-Wise Selector status: active oneLiner: A small public tool that recommends tree species suited to your zip code and growing conditions. needs: [frontend, backend]
What we're building
Tree-Wise Selector is a recommendation tool for picking the right tree to plant. You give it a location and a few growing-condition inputs; it returns species that will actually thrive there, with USDA-sourced imagery and 60+ attributes per species. It's aimed at homeowners, landscapers, and small-municipal arborists who need a faster answer than a regional extension service can give them.
Where we are
The recommendation engine and admin tooling are stable; the project is in a steady production-hardening cadence — image proxy, structured logging, database health checks, CSP, accessibility polish. The admin side is full-featured: CRUD on tree records, moderation queues with audit trails, user promotion, real-time analytics.
What you'd do
If you join as a frontend contributor, the work is on UI polish and on the design system that ties the recommendation flow and the admin surfaces together. If you join as a backend contributor, what would matter most is performance work for larger species datasets and a review of the indexing strategy ahead of multi-user scaling.