Saving trees with AI ‘guardians’
To curb illegal land clearing, the nonprofit Rainforest Connection attaches acoustic monitoring sensors to trees that “eavesdrop” on the surrounding forest and transmit that audio in real-time to the cloud.
The data is analyzed by a machine learning model that has been trained on audio collected from the rainforest to recognize sounds linked to illegal logging, such as a chainsaw or truck. Alerts are then sent out to authorities on the ground.