Rainforests are an important home for thousands of species as well as helping towards global warming. Rainforests contain half of all life on Earth’s land mass and produce 20% of our oxygen, despite only covering 2% of our planet’s surface. However, they are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is estimated that up to 90% of all deforestation in tropical rainforests is illegal, wreaking havoc on the diverse animal and plant life that call the rainforest their home. One of the biggest drivers for this has been agriculture, as cattle ranchers transform the land to be used to raising livestock. Sadly, deforestation is difficult to detect and about a fifth of the Amazon rainforest has been lost in the last 50 years.

One of the reasons that it’s difficult to protect the rainforest is its size. The Amazon Rainforest is 23 times larger than the United Kingdom, making it impossible to monitor manually. It’s for this reason that organizations like The Rainforest Connection are turning to AI. The Rainforest Connection has combined solar panels and cells phones to create a cheap and rigorous acoustic monitoring system. They call these Guardian devices, and use AI to monitor for sounds of logging, such as chainsaws and vehicles, that are far away and imperceptible to the human ear. When these sounds are detected, the device alerts authorities in real time to intervene.