A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created an energy-tracking app that could encourage sustainable behaviors.

Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science, designed "MyEarth -- Track Your Carbon Savings" with a diary format in which users can choose daily activities to reduce their carbon emissions and energy consumption.

Wong and her team drew on parallels between food consumption and energy use and designed the new app with approaches used in food-tracking apps that help users catalog their daily eating habits.

"We tried to categorize it into the different kinds of activities that you can do so that people can select from whatever suits their lifestyle," Wong said in a statement.

"MyEarth" is organized with five main categories: electricity, recycling, travel, food and usage. Each category includes day-to-day activities as simple recycling a milk jug to more complicated actions, such as upgrading to a high-efficiency toilet that reduces the need for energy-intensive wastewater treatment.

Users accumulate saved carbon units as they check off activities in their individual diaries.

Wong wanted the app to track daily progress visually to help users see how smaller steps can build to achieve a larger goal and that individual actions can have broader impact.

She hopes people will use the new app to identify and prioritize energy-saving activities. Her belief that behaviors need to be simple and understandable in order to become sustainable motivated her to create "MyEarth;"

"There is a real disconnect between what people say that they want to do in terms of their attitudes toward the environment and conservation and translating that into actual behavior," Wong said. "Carbon units are too abstract for people to understand. Translating conservation behaviors into something tangible, such as a growing iceberg, could help."

Wong said the app will hopefully help people understand that small steps taken to sustain the environment are not insignificant.