Treedano: NFTs for mature trees

More background on the problem:

We only have one Mother Earth, there is no Planet B. The 8 billion people that call this beautiful world their home are dependent on its health and well-being to live comfortably and to avoid a dreadful dystopian future with mass extinction events.

Trees are the unsung heroes in our epic, collective struggle to turn the tide against climate change and its dramatic geo-political effects. Trees act as carbon stores and they filter air toxins. In Canada, for example, forests have been found to moderate climate change by absorbing about one-quarter of the carbon emitted by human activities. (1) In urban areas, they improve land values, reduce energy consumption as well as improve livability and mental health. (2)

Trees serve other major environmental functions such as regulating rainfall and holding soil in place. The effects of deforestation can be seen globally with irregular rainfalls and flooding becoming increasingly prevalent across the globe. Even worse, developing countries that lack financial resources for mitigation action are disproportionately affected. (3)

In the recent past new concepts related to the valuation of trees have been piloted, mostly through carbon offset purchases that plant brand-new trees. However, it will take decades for those trees to attain the same natural capital value as the estimated 3 trillion trees worldwide that are still in the ground. (4) The vast majority of this number needs to stay in the ground for humans and animals to survive the oncoming climate disaster onslaught.

In March 2021, The United Nations adopted the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). This framework integrates economic and environmental data to provide an international standard for natural capital accounting rules and producing internationally comparable statistics and accounts. (5) This is an incredibly useful tool but international organizations and governments are notoriously slow in implementing revolutionary new systems. They can't match the speed of innovation and deployment that the Cardano community is ready to provide.

Our solution will:

1. Provide a tangible, rapid-action implementation of the United Nation's SEEA framework. We don't have any time to waste on more studies and reports. Our simple-to-use mobile Dapp will quickly protect billions of otherwise undocumented mature trees in a decentralized carbon-offset market.
2. Crowd-source and gamify mature tree inventorying through a fun mobile app game. This Dapp will educate users about tree species and their full ecological value. It will also promote healthy and fun lifestyle activities like back-country hiking and geo-caching. "Tree pinning" actions by our Dapp users will be rewarded with Treedano tokens (native assets) that can be exchanged on Cardano's DEXes. Think https://inaturalist.org meets http://tiktok.com meets https://runkeeper.com meets ADA rewards.
3. Provide the missing link between on-chain NFTrees and real-world tree protection laws, regulations, and covenants using regularly-scheduled "proof-of-tree" verification by our on-the-ground Dapp user. Our pilot project will begin with forested, privately-owned properties on the ecologically unique Savary Island, located in British Columbia's Salish Sea. Our second pilot will inventory publicly-owned trees in British Columbia's expansive provincial parks, many containing a large percentage of the world's last remaining old growth forests. Unsanctioned tree felling will result in loss of token stakes and lowered network reputation scores.
4. Reward individual property owners, land conservation trusts, and government agencies for helping to reverse unnatural climate change by keeping their mature trees in the ground. Treedano will be governed via a DAO that includes a stake-based treasury which issues regularly-scheduled reward tokens to registered tree "owners".
5. Allow rich corporations to contribute financially to the climate change struggle and promote their brands in a much less cynical way than purchasing traditional carbon offsets that promote a "pay to pollute" mindset. This is expected to be a major source of funding for the Treedano DAO treasury (6)
6. Avoid the cumbersome process of selling carbon credits on centralized, enterprise platforms by bringing millions of mature tree owners into the permission-less Cardano ecosystem via an easy-to-use mobile Dapp.
7. Create a thriving DEX-based market using a native Cardano-minted Treedano token that provides the opportunity to receive significant financial rewards for doing the right thing.

Dapps & integration challenge criteria:
We believe that Treedano is an innovative and socially impactful response to the Fund 7 Dapps & integration Challenge which has the following assessment criteria:

• "Novel and viable applications get built of on top of Cardano attracting users. Integrations manage to pull in more adoption.
• Did our efforts manage to attract users to the platform? Did our efforts result in new, viable applications built on top of Cardano?"

The goal of the Fund 7 Treedano pilot phase is to prove that it is a viable application and concept that will draw many new users to the Cardano ecosystem. Most will be motivated by the ability to take concrete action on climate change in a fun and positive way without ever being aware that they are doing so on Cardano. For those who are interested, we will have plenty of open documentation and tutorials to further explain the technology. This is how #RealFi should be. In short, Treedano is expected to add 100's of millions of transactions to the Cardano blockchain and SAVE OUR PLANET!

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(1) https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/climate-change/impacts-adaptations/climate-change-impacts-forests/forest-carbon/13085

(2) https://www.fao.org/zhc/detail-events/en/c/454543/

(3) www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/49073/how-widespread-deforestation-in-africa-risks-our-climate-future/

(4) https://localtreeestimates.com/how-many-trees-are-in-the-world

(5) https://seea.un.org/news/historic-un-statistical-commission-seea

(6) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-22/carbon-markets-may-soon-free-billions-for-investment-but-where

 Our values:

• Protecting and celebrating as many mature trees in the ground as possible, worldwide, forever.
• Be honest and kind. Saving planet earth comes before personalities.
• Delivering innovative technology.
• Building meaningful, long-term relationships.
• Demonstrating professional excellence.
• Empowering team-members to do their best work.
• Copy-left. Good ideas like Treedano must be protected from get-rich-quick, commercial interests. We are claiming copyright on this concept so that we can enshrine our values in our work products. We will make the Treedano software, documentation, and promotional materials available under free and open-source (FOSS) Creative Commons and MIT licenses. Then other FOSS teams will be free to pursue the same goals in their own way, while sharing tools and technology freely, without fear of corporate walled gardens that can stifle progressive, environmentally-conscious projects like Treedano.

Licensing:

The software source code will be published under the permissive, open-source MIT license. All software documentation will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0-International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.

Core team:

1. Moira O'Keeffe: Treedano Ambassador and Field Tester

Moira has professional experience as a teacher in Fiji and as a construction site first aid and safety officer in Metro Vancouver. She is an avid back-country hiker and skier. Through these experiences she has developed a profound appreciation for not only the forests and nature, but the individual trees themselves. As such she has been devastated by the brutal clear-cutting of mature trees that are otherwise a place of true solace for countless humans and home to hundreds of flora and fauna species. Like many of her twenty-something peers she is equally at home in the world of social media as she is hiking trails in British Columbia's amazing back country and provincial parks. She is eager to combine these skills to help field test and promote the Treedano Dapp and concept.

2. Melanie Russo: Cardano4Climate Ambassador

Melanie is an advocate for the preservation of old growth forest ecosystems, like Ada'itsx (Fairy Creek) on Vancouver Island, BC. She is a mother, tree-hugger, and connector. Melanie is one of the co-facilitators of the decentralized action group Cardano4Climate. This work has made her a respected leader in the Cardano community. 

Melanie will be applying her empathetic relation-building skills to connect Treedano with compatible stakeholders and projects that are also passionate about leveraging Cardano blockchain technology in our epic struggle to protect and nurture Mother Earth.

3. Peter Van Garderen: Treedano lead developer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petervangarderen/

Peter's family are cabin owners on a beautiful Savary Island, British Columbia, Canada which is experiencing serious unregulated deforestation on private properties that should be protected under a legal title covenant. His engagement with the island's land trust led him to develop the Treedano concept.

Peter is a professional archivist and a world-renowned expert in the field of digital records management. He is the founder of the industry-leading Archivematica and AccessToMemory open-source software projects which are used by institutions worldwide to preserve and provide access to digital archives collections. Peter is also the lead developer of the Catalyst Fund 6 project Orcfax which is developing a truly trustworthy Cardano oracle using "proofs-of-fact" based on academic record-keeping research. Peter will introduce the Orcfax decentralized record-keeping components as a foundational layer for the Treedano components that will require trustworthy off-chain recordkeeping and blockchain notarization to prove the veracity of Treedano's NFTs.

4. Dorus Van Der Kroft: Treedano lead developer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dorus/

Dorus is a full stack developer with over twenty years of industry experience delivering projects from start to finish for both start-ups and large enterprises. His broad set of technical skills spans from coding to technical design, to functional design and requirements analysis. He's also received training in the fields of testing and deployment. Dorus is an expert consultant for the Mendix "low code" platform and he is looking forward to implementing this agile development tool to deliver the Treedano mobile app MVP.

Our roadmap to success:

After one month:

1. Use case stories
2. Dapp mockups
3. Blog post: "How Treedano implements natural capital accounting"
4. Tokenized tree map proof-of-concept

After two months:

1. Proof-of-concept: mobile Dapp
2. Proof-of-concept: NFT minting and off-chain recordkeeping
3. Technical architecture documentation posted at docs.treedano.app
4. Blog post: "Treedano technical architecture update"
5. Full tree inventory of one Savary Island, B.C. private property
6. Partial tree inventory along one B.C. provincial park trail
7. Blog post: "How Treedano implements NFT technology"

After three months:

1. Treedano MVP launched on Cardano Testnet
2. Treedano NFTs minted for three Savary Island, B.C. private properties
3. Treedano NFTs minted along two B.C. Provincial Park trails
4. Proof-of-concept: Atala Prism DID integration
5. Blog post: "Treedano on the trail"
6. Blog post: "Using Treedano in Open Carbon Offset Markets"
7. Treedano Whitepaper v1 (solution concept and technical architecture)

-------- end of Fund 7 grant--------

After six months:

1. Treedano Whitepaper v2: Decentralized Autonomous Organization and tokenomics
2. Treedano Initial Stake Pool Offering (ISPO)
3. Production-ready Atala Prism DID integration
4. Landano beta Dapp on Testnet
5. Full inventory and Treedano NFT minting for one private B.C. Land Trust property
6. One pilot project with a B.C. Municipality that has an enforceable urban tree bylaw
7. One pilot project with a B.C. First Nations
8. 20,000 NFTs for mature trees on Treedano testnet
9. 100 Dapp users on Treedano testnet

After one year:

1. Cardano Level 3 Certified Dapp
2. Treedano launch on Cardano mainnet
3. Treeano DAO operational
4. Treeano utility token minted and circulating as Cardano native asset
5. 100,000+ NFTs for mature trees on Treedano mainnet
6. 1000+ Dapp users on Treedano mainnet
7. The Treedano Dapp is marketed beyond the initial British Columbia-based pilot projects to a national and international user base.

Our budget:
Our team believes in equal pay for all the human resources that are contributing to delivering the tasks and products on our roadmap. We have decided on the rate of $75 per hour as a fair reflection of the team's significant and unique expertise as well as in consideration of our living costs and earning potential outside Project Catalyst.

Our team members will provide their own computing equipment. Hosting for the project website and code repositories are provided free of charge via Github. Community outreach will be done via (free) Twitter and YouTube accounts as well as the various Project Catalyst communication channels.

Please refer to our detailed roadmap above for descriptions of the tasks and work products that will be delivered in three, four-week sprints:

• Month 1 (Tasks #1-4): 190 hours x $75 = $14,250
• Month 2 (Tasks #1-7): 170 hours x $75 = $12,750
• Month 3 (Tasks #1-7): 270 hours x $75 = $20,250
• Professional fees: including legal, accounting, and communications: $9,000

TOTAL: $56,250