Team Onboarding - Project Background in Plain Terms

The simple, no-jargon explanation of this project - for Rory, Alex, or anyone new joining the team so nobody walks into a Shell meeting blind.

• Shell is sponsoring our senior design project. They have real data from a research farm - years of measurements like temperature, rainfall, soil moisture, and "carbon flux" (a way of measuring whether soil/plants are absorbing CO2 from the air or releasing it back out).
• They collect this with sensor towers on the farm called "flux towers." Some plots got fertilizer, some didn't (a real controlled experiment), so we can compare "Plot A vs Plot B" over time.
• Right now this data just sits in spreadsheets. Our job: build an app/website that turns it into simple charts and maps - like a weather app, but for farm/environmental health - so anyone (a farmer, a scientist, even Shell's own team) can glance at it and understand what's happening.
• Our mentor is Dr. Kuloyo at Shell. His colleague Hemshikha holds the actual dataset and will show us Shell's own internal visualization tool as a reference.
• Course context: this is COMP 4207 (Senior Design Project I) with Dr. Shuvo. Big graded deliverables: a requirements/system-spec report (25%), a design report with diagrams (25%), and an implementation/demo report (25%), plus weekly progress reports.
• Team roles we're filling: someone focused on the visuals/UI, someone on data/API/backend, and someone on testing/QA and system architecture.