Raman Arunachalam

trees

Indian Institute of Science

Bengaluru

For each small park, I took around one hour to mark all the trees and took three hours at least to mark the trees in larger parks­ — Raman Arunachalam

RARE SPECIES MARKED

By Reya Mehrotraquit his plum job six months ago to follow his passionA Bengaluru-based techie has developed an app to tracein the city. Born in Chennai and an(IISc) alumni, Raman Arunachalam developed the app ‘Tree Logger’ in four months, having studied’s biodiversity since 2005.He gave up his job six months ago to follow his passion and spent at least 10 hours a week marking trees in Bengaluru.He said, “Though I have marked a number of trees myself in Bengaluru, I cannot mark them all and hence am planning to enable a crowdsourcing feature where naturalists and experts can identify and mark the trees on the app. But I still need to verify right sources. Currently, anyone can mark any tree in the city but it will be visible only to them in the app, as it is not possible for me to verify if the source of information is correct or not. Once I fully develop the feature where only verified sources can mark, the experts will also be able to use the app to mark the trees. People can then also form communities and volunteer for identifying trees.”He started with educating his colleagues about the rich biodiversity of the city. But he found that though the city had a number of nature lovers, it lacked a mechanism to put out accurate information to them about all the plant species. “Though some apps and webpages named certain flowers found in the city, detailed information about the trees, types of leaves, fruits and trunks were missing,” he said.The app traces your location and tells you the details of the nearest trees that have been marked in the app. Most of the trees from Lalbagh, Cubbon Park and other smaller parks have been marked in the app.The app currently functions in 10 Indian languages like English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi. However, he is still working on further bettering the regional language feature. A resident of Ulsoor, he marked trees in Indiranagar, Koramangala and Ulsoor besides in several parks.Some of the marked species found in abundance in Bengaluru include Gulmohar Tree, Copper Pod Tree and Rain Tree. While some of the rare species marked by him include Australian Flame Tree and Elephant Apple Tree found on 12th main in Indiranagar, Ceylon Olive Tree near Indiranagar Club, Broken Bones Tree found opposite Philips building near Ulsoor Lake.The inspiration for his work remains Pradip Krishen’s Trees of Delhi. But he chose to develop an app instead of writing a book as he wanted to constantly update and add information as one cannot do that once a book has been published. His work has not ended yet. He plans to mark as many trees in the city as possible. He says, “This will be a long-term project. I will keep adding new trees to the maps.