[Project]
GROWhere
GROWhere is a tool that answers a question most people don't even know to ask before they plant a tree in India: is this land actually mine to plant on. Built with a professor of mine, it's less a data product and more an attempt to make land legible again, to take the scattered, technical, bureaucratic mess of soil data, satellite imagery, and zoning law and hand it back to a person standing in a field with a sapling. Grow Here. That's the name, and that's the whole point.
[Problem]
In India, the biggest thing standing between a person and planting a tree isn't ecology, it's ownership. Land law here often ends up favoring whoever is actively tending the land over whoever legally owns it, and reforms haven't fully closed that gap. So encroachment isn't a technicality, it's a real risk hanging over anyone trying to do something as simple as plant a tree. Our question became: how might we let someone plant a tree somewhere available to everyone, without stepping on land that isn't theirs to use. Restor already does this at a global, general level. We wanted something that went narrower and deeper: built for India specifically, pulling from enough real sources that it feels less like a demo and more like something you could actually trust.
[Solution]
We layered Sentinel-2 imagery, SMAP soil moisture, Copernicus land cover, and zoning data to score any clicked location in real time, but the scoring is only half the story. It tells you what kind of tree actually belongs there (no one's planting a mango tree in Jammu and Kashmir), which local NGOs are already working in that area, and what's happening on the ground right now, because a plantation site means nothing if a highway project is about to clear it. It's not just "can I plant here." It's "should I, right now, given everything happening around this piece of land."
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