High schooler's tree-tracking app wins $100K scholarship

Josh Kirsch spent his pandemic year in Grade 6 reading a library book about Alberta's heritage trees. A decade later, he's built a working platform that catalogs them — and landed a $100,000 scholarship to study at the University of Alberta.

The idea started simple. A librarian gave him Heritage Trees of Alberta, which profiled over 300 significant trees across the province. Kirsch became obsessed. He began documenting them himself, hiking across Alberta from Edmonton and Calgary to remote mountain backcountry, memorizing species and tracking measurements.

By Grade 7, he had enough data to plot heritage trees on a Google Map. But the tool couldn't scale. "I was gathering so much information that I kind of outgrew that," Kirsch said. So in Grade 9, he taught himself to code and built his own platform from scratch.

Ancient Roots Alberta launched this year with 387 trees organized by category — champions, centurions, native sentinels, storytellers, unique growth patterns, tallest, largest circumference, edible fruit, and prime examples. Users can explore the oldest boulevard tree in Edmonton: a Siberian elm planted between 1910 and 1920, nearly 13 metres tall with a canopy spanning over 25 metres.

The scholarship recognizes what started as a kid's fascination with the outdoors. Kirsch grew up in the city but spent his time on walking trails and along the river valley. That curiosity — and the discipline to build something real from it — is exactly what gets you noticed by universities.