When Ishanvi Shetty sat in an Eco council meeting at Dubai's Gems Modern Academy in September 2024, she noticed her classmates had no shortage of ideas for environmental projects.
What they lacked was a foundation to make those projects possible. That’s when she came up with the Flora and Fauna Footprint Project, which initially aimed to create a baseline understanding of life already on their campus.
The project has since taken on a life of its own, as, 18 months later, the student-led initiative has engaged more than 1,500 pupils across seven schools in the UAE, building an interactive digital map of campus biodiversity that future generations can use to drive conservation work.
“I'm passionate about the intersection of technology and sustainability to form large-scale, system-driven projects,” said Ishanvi, who is now in her final year at the school. “The Flora and Fauna Footprint presented itself as a paragon of this, engaging youth across the country in documenting and preserving campus heritage.”
She brought in two classmates: Laiba Adnaan, who takes environmental science and had experience in recycling drives and sustainability initiatives, and Swana Athithi, whose long-standing interest in conservation immediately drew her to the scale of data the project could generate.
“I was thinking about the amount of data we would end up collecting and how that could help in the conservation of species or enhancing the ecological biodiversity in our school,” Swana told The National. “That was really captivating.”
Mapping the campus
The methodology was simple. Working with school staff and guided by Gems Modern Academy's head of the Eco-Council, the trio divided the campus map into sections and assigned each to a class in middle and high school. During value education lessons, pupils went outside with plant-identification apps and physically recorded every species they could find, then completed a standardised data form the team had designed.
“Through that, we were able to compile all of the data and actually create the map,” said Laiba.
Ishanvi led the technical side of the operation, developing the coding framework and data architecture that allowed the information to be systematically stored, accessed and expanded over time. The result was a comprehensive, interactive digital database of the school's plant life – one now featured on Gems Modern Academy's official website – that revealed how much biodiversity existed within the campus walls.
The school already ran seasonal planting cycles, maintained a meditation garden and a dedicated planting patch, and the Environmental Council had installed guards to protect existing trees. But until pupils recorded everything systematically, the full picture had never been captured.
“We all knew that the school has plants,” said Ishanvi. “But when you actually go out and make an effort to learn about it and record all of them, you realise it's so much more than you would have ever thought.”
The reaction from pupils – many of whom participated through the school's moral education programme rather than on a purely voluntary basis – was more enthusiastic than the founders had anticipated.
“They didn't quite have a choice, but we were so happy to see that students were enthusiastic to help out,” Laiba said. “They became more conscious of the efforts that the school is taking to be environmentally sustainable.”
Beyond the map
The database is not a finish line. The founders were always clear that the map was a starting point – a tool that would make future conservation and biodiversity projects faster, cheaper and better targeted. Phase two focuses on translating that data into action.
“Now it's so much easier, because we know exactly what's present species-wise on the school campus,” said Laiba. “It will be easier to design protection programmes, restoration programmes and other initiatives that can specifically help target these exact species.
“The map itself is like the base in terms of establishing environmental sustainability as a foundation in our school,” she added. “But from here, there's still so much scope of what can be done with it.”
Conservation programmes aimed at protecting species at risk, as well as initiatives designed to actively increase biodiversity on campus, will now be easier than ever, said Swana. “Having a diversity of species would increase the stability of an ecosystem,” she said. “The ecological diversity will also be enhanced, which will support other species as well, because they're all interconnected.”
As the project’s name suggests, however, the first phase is only partially fulfilled. So far, they’ve mapped plant life, but birds, insects and other fauna remain a goal for the next cohort of student leaders, as Ishvani, Swana and Laiba head off to university. The founders also hope they will eventually work with government agencies and the Ministry of Education to incorporate the data into formal environmental education programmes as the project scales further.
Madhumita Chatterjee, an environmental science senior faculty teacher at the school, said the project had achieved something that classroom instruction alone rarely manages. “The Flora and Fauna Footprint Project has forged a meaningful bridge between nature and knowledge,” she told The National.
“Through immersive, hands-on engagement, it inspires us to both learn from and give back to the natural world around us. This initiative cultivates a deep sense of personal responsibility, empowering individuals to contribute towards a more sustainable and ecologically conscious future,” she added.
