A Fresh Start!

Post date: Sep 09, 2017 5:6:33 PM

Hello and welcome to the 2017 Venice Green team's blog! We are excited to keep everyone informed about our latest updates and reflect our weekly progress on this blog. Here is something about ourselves: we (Gabe, Chenggu, Kinsey and Nathan) are juniors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and are working together towards the completion of our Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP)! The goal of IQPs are to provide students with experience of working in interdisciplinary teams to solve problems or needs that lie at the intersection of science and society.

To be more specific about our particular project, we identified the problem as the lack of systematic organization of the current existing green spaces, and the waste of potential usage for organic farming. We are starting to work closely with Fattoria Urbana Difussa (FUD), our sponsor who has a great interest in cultivating and distributing fresh organic fruits and vegetables in Venice. The goal of our team is to assist FUD in developing a plan to manage green spaces and utilize them more efficiently as farming spaces. We plan to map all the green spaces in the Venice Lagoons by researching existing data as well as performing field investigations once the team arrives in Venice. This data we collected will be the basis for the phone app that we plan to create. This phone application aims to contain a map of all the green spaces that we identified in Venice and our evaluations on their quality. The team has started brainstorming and researching the methods to assess soil quality so that we can provide recommendations to FUD on what types of crops can be planted on a specific piece of land.

We are all extremely excited to have the opportunity to work with our sponsor and explore the great islands of Venice. We have a great passion for our project and we are confident on what we can achieve in this 14 week period. If you are interested in our project, please feel free to read up on our project's progress and check our updates. Thanks for reading!