If Poachers and Illegal Loggers Strike, This Forest Phones It In
Environmentalists are bugging rainforests with discarded smartphones to catch poachers and illegal loggers

Jun 24, 2014 |By W. Wayt Gibbs

When a tree falls to illegal loggers in the forest of the Kalaweit Supayang Nature Conservation Reserve for gibbons in West Sumatra, Indonesia, it most definitely makes a sound—and generates a text message to alert reserve managers. Last summer a tiny, nonprofit start-up called Rainforest Connection installed a handful of old, donated smartphones, each tricked out with a solar charger and reprogrammed to conduct audio surveillance, into the forest canopy. The system quickly brought logging to a halt, says Topher White, a 31-year-old physicist who designed the system and founded the outfit.

Now, with the help of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the KfW development bank in Germany, Rainforest Connection is preparing to deploy dozens of such listening devices in equatorial Africa to protect endangered forest elephants and their habitats. “This technology enables the forest to talk to the world,” says musician Neil Young in a video produced by Rainforest Connection for a fund-raising campaign it plans to launch today on Kickstarter. “The forest can speak—and you can hear it. They can hear the first saw, they can hear the rifle shots when people are shooting animals and shouldn’t be. They can tell when the forest is under attack by people who are breaking the law.”

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