Pune: Third year botany students of Sir Parashurambhau (SP) College have developed a QR codes for 400 existing trees on the campus to spread awareness about protection of trees.
The team of five students, Anand Changediya, Rushikesh Labade, Avinash Narnor, Laxman More and Abhishek Kumbhar, have put up barcodes on the tree. These codes will enable an onlooker to seek information about the tree by scanning the barcode.
“We wanted to participate in one of the conference of bioinformatics. It was for this conference that our vice-principal of science faculty Anil Dusane came up with idea of developing QR codes for trees. The difficult part is to accumulate data, while creating the QR codes is easy. On an average, it took one day to collect data of 100 trees,” said Changediya.
These QR code can be scanned through a camscanner or any scanning application available on smartphones. After this, a PDF will be downloaded from where the details can be obtained, said Changediya.
“Our purpose is to create awareness about trees and their importance. Generally, we observe that only botany students or enthusiasts know about the features of a tree and can identify the characteristics of it. These barcodes will provide information to even the common man,” said Anil Dusane, Vice-Principal of Science Department at SP College.
“There are 14-15 points available for each code, like vernacular name (local name) of the tree, scientific name, Sanskrit name, from which family it belongs and details of the species. The medical uses and cultural relevance is also mentioned. It will also have geotagging, which will provide information about the longitude and latitude of the plant, which means where the species of this plant is available in abundance,” said Dusane.
The team is planning to expand its work on trees located on Tilak Road. They have also planned to approach residential areas and Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) to develop QR codes for trees located there.
“Trees are an essential part of the environment. They are home for birds, insects and many other species. At present, when trees are being chopped and the greenery has vanished, specially from cities, it is necessary that students develop awareness about protecting trees,” said Dilip Sheth, Principal of SP College.
