From October 10 to 12, 2025, the Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL) partnered with the UNC School of Data Science and Society (SDSS) to co-host a track at HackNC 2025, North Carolina’s largest hackathon. The event brought together over 500 students from schools in the region eager to tackle real-world tech challenges.
Our track, “Climate Action in North Carolina”, was conceptualized by our lab’s Dr. Sarah Berk, whose research focuses on urban heat stress and disparities in North Carolina. Participants were provided with extensive datasets collected by DDL, such as air temperature in Durham, and were challenged to design a solution to tackle urban heat stress.
Congratulations to all the participating teams and Tamagotree, our track winner!
Tamagotree, inspired by the Tamagotchi digital pet toy, is a “gamified community-driven tree care platform” for Durham, NC. In the application, users are encouraged to ‘adopt-a-tree’ in their neighborhoods to care for, especially younger trees that are more prone to environmental stresses like heat waves and droughts. The team noted that many young trees planted by the city died in their first year due to a lack of consistent care and monitoring, and they wanted to develop a solution to complement existing community efforts. Their proposed solution would enable citizens to monitor and track more vulnerable, younger trees, especially during heat waves, to ensure their longevity.
Other innovative solutions include a spatial analysis tool to identify local neighborhoods most in need of cooling interventions, as well as an AI tool to visualize and interpret heat wave patterns in Durham.
As part of NCHacks, our lab’s Dr. Zhang Yuetong and Dr. Sarah Berk also served as mentors, providing expert guidance and insights into our environmental dataset.
On her experience, Dr. Sarah Berk said, “It was a pleasure serving as a mentor and judge for the NC Hackathon. I was very impressed by the creativity and high quality of the projects the students created, especially in such a short space of time. Beyond the coding, teams were deeply engaged with the scientific literature, demonstrating a strong understanding of how factors like green space, tree canopy, and albedo influence urban heat stress. They combined this scientific insight with coding expertise to build truly impressive tools for heat mitigation and adaptation.”
“I really enjoyed mentoring and seeing how the teams collaborated to troubleshoot and problem-solve together. Judging such a diverse range of innovative projects was both challenging and a real honor. It was also great working alongside the School of Data Science and Department of Computer Sciences, whose enthusiasm for tackling complex data challenges really shone through.”
Congratulations again to all the participating teams. We would also like to extend our thanks to HackNC and the UNC School of Data Science and Society for this opportunity to innovate for the climate.
You can view all participating projects here.
