Activists are pushing for the first-ever UNESCO status for acoustics to be awarded to the calls of 400 bird species and rare frogs in the Mashpi cloud forest.
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If a tree is illegally cut down in a remote section of the rainforest, does anyone hear the sound? If that section of the rainforest is using Rainforest Connection’s treetop surveillance technology, then yes, someone actually does hear the sound. They also act on it.
The forest-monitoring technology, dubbed “Forest Guardians”, started off in 2012 as an idea to use recycled, solar-powered cellphones fitted with artificial intelligence software to monitor the activity and biodiversity of the surroundings. Re-fangled cell phones were mounted several hundred feet in the air, directly onto trees in the Supayang forest in Sumatra, Indonesia, where they listened to the sounds of the forest, connected to existing cell phone networks, and sent mobile alerts to rangers in the field when anything out of the ordinary was detected. Newer versions are now based on custom logic boards but cell phone devices are still operating in some countries, like Ecuador, where upgr