Rainforest Connection

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is a nonprofit tech start-up committed to applying the most effective and timely technology to protect our planet’s precious, ancient forests and wildlife. Their large-scale goal is to give the people on the ground the technology they need to protect their forests from all illegal activities, such as logging, poaching, and mining. In order to do this, the individual project goals are more specific. Permanent RFCx locations are mapped to help monitor key areas for incursions and deploy (“Guardians”) at targeted locations. They train the local partners to use the system, including how to use/navigate the Web Console and Ranger Application to review alerts and use the reports and data for maximum effectiveness, as well as a general understanding of how the Guardians operate and are deployed. This is done so the local partners are prepared to eventually managing the RFCx Guardians themselves. As the local partners accompany the RFCx teams, this leads to the local partners being informally trained on basic Guardians installation and deployment. The objective is to send real-time alerts to partners on the ground which enables them to investigate the potential threat and intervene as necessary. This allows for patterns of activity to be found for planned interventions and to measure the effectiveness of responses by decreased logging or poaching activities in the area. RFCx can then capture and archive forensic evidence of illegal activity for prosecution and create a large trove of rainforest data for future analysis and expansion of the sound/alert library and ecosystem benchmarking, allowing for species accounting.

Having tested the system for over four years in rainforests around the world, RFCx has moved beyond proof of concept. RFCx technology acts as a force multiplier which does much of the work for a fraction of the cost. RFCx technology is advancing through a comprehensive biodiversity monitoring program that allows the local partners to measure progress of wildlife restoration and recovery through principles of adaptive management. RFCx strives to protect as much of the world’s remaining intact ecosystems as possible to slow climate change and conserve biodiversity.

RFCx strives to be at the forefront of conservation technology. As a natural progression to data being captured, RFCx is also building a Bioacoustics platform. Bioacoustics studies have proven to be uniquely powerful in understanding the health and makeup of ecosystems, but methods of capture and analysis have been expensive, effort intensive, highly specific and uncollaborative. To date, data are often stored in unstandardized formats on local disks with little means for collaboration, and software tools for analysis are run locally.

The only anti-logging methods prior to RFCx were ground patrols, camera traps, and satellite imagery, none of which allowed coverage of large expanses as well as timely alerts. Guardians were built out of used smartphones, solar panel scraps, a microphone, and an antenna to act as an acoustic monitoring device. Acoustics are able to cover much larger areas and aren’t hindered by the visual limitations of the forest, enabling real-time alerts across vast reserves. What sets this solution apart from others is the ability for the devices in the field to live stream the sounds of the forest 24/7. The recorded audio is then uploaded to the cloud where deep learning AI models run over the data uploaded and are able to make instant detections. Whether it is a chainsaw sound, vehicle, or the detection of a specific animal species, rangers and conservationists on the ground are immediately alerted on their mobile devices. RFCx role as a technology provider allows them to partner with local NGOs and indigenous tribes to deter incursions through real time threat detection and provide forensic evidence to enable governments to take action for prevention. RFCx makes this data available to academic researchers and government agencies to assist the fields of field ecology and conservation. Another benefit of the continuous recording is the creation of a sound Arc of the forest which enables analysis of this audio over and over as new detection models are created and added to the platform. The need and the impact of a Bioacoustics Platform was clear. However, there were many challenges to developing this platform. The use of advanced technology by scientists specializing in conservation was little to none, and the same was at the flip side - only a handful of data scientists were working on using AI technology for conservation. Because of the field experience that RFCx has; the access to data and the trusted relationships with scientists, the RFCx team is best positioned to lead these efforts and revolutionize the way scientists use technology to make discoveries, process their data and conduct their research.

RFCx has also developed the first working model of a Bioacoustics Platform that aggregates acoustic data from various sources enabling audio-fed deep learning models to ingest and analyze audio at-scale. At every step of the process, RFCx teams are learning, understanding, capturing the information, developing and continuously iterating on the feature sets to allow for optimization and efficiency.

Additionally, RFCx team has partnered with industry experts to fast-track these efforts. One of the most significant is our partnership with Google. In 2019, Google.org launched the AI for Social Good Challenge. After a rigorous selection process which included thousands of applicants from all over the world, RFCx was one of the handful of NGOs awarded a grant exclusively for the further development of the Bioacoustics Platform.

The Rainforest Connection team is determined and resilient. The founder & CEO, Topher White, is an inventor, physicist, and software engineer. He has been building systems for large and small startups as well as international science projects, including four years working on nuclear fusion at ITER, in France. He is also a National Geographic Explorer. RFCx COO, Bourhan Yassin, is a long-time veteran of the tech industry. Bourhan has over fifteen years’ experience in building and leading large-scale Manufacturing and Engineering teams in several Bay Area companies including Powis and Zazzle, as well as the leading Dubai-based e-commerce company MarkaVIP, where he served as long-time COO before joining RFCx. Mahreen Qazi, Business Projects Director, is a versatile business transformation leader who over her illustrious career has helped guide business to success through sustainable value creation. With more than 15 years of operational and management experience working with leading companies in UAE; Mahreen has helped leading businesses succeed through business re-engineering and innovative growth strategies. Together, they lead a team of engineers and have developed the capacity to scale ecosystem protection using acoustics around the world. The Guardians have been iterated countless times over the five years of operation to be extremely robust to all unpredictable environmental factors. They generally last several years without needing physical maintenance, and updates can be pushed over the air. With support from many well-known and respected foundations and corporations, RFCx is well-equipped to fund and implement many more projects in the upcoming years. Rainforest Connection is also expanding its capabilities to support bio-monitoring of endangered species. Developing new AI models requires expert engineers, which limits scalability, so they are building a web based platform that allows biologists and ecologists to collaborate together with data scientists, to create new AI models and continually fine-tune existing AI models. Their objective is to ultimately be able to detect hundreds of species, to support monitoring and protection conservation efforts.

Rainforest Connection Guardians have been improved many times over the years and are now functioning extremely effectively. Once installed, they generally work well for several years without having to be touched. Over 2019, RFCx upgraded them even further to make them incredibly robust to survive the harsh environmental conditions present in the rainforest. By doing serious updates to our hardware, software, solar panels, and antennas, the Guardians are in better shape than ever to last a long time. These devices have internal storage and offline recording capabilities, allowing for constant data collection. Guardians have directional antennas able to pick up signals from 24-25 km away. Running on solar panels, they are self-sustaining. They use CDM to find the nearest server (hundreds of thousands all over the world) utilizing a cloud solution company, and RFCx hosts the data on the closest server automatically. The Guardian software can be updated over-the-air, so RFCx can push updates and new enhancements. All audio collected is uploaded to the cloud, where they do analysis and run AI/Machine Learning to detect the sound of illegal activities (chainsaw, vehicle, and gunshot models) and various animal species. This allows for models to be constantly improving. Nearly immediate alerts are sent to rangers on the ground using the RFCx Ranger App or web console. The Ranger App is available as an easily downloadable app on Android phones. It includes features like the rangers being able to verify alerts by audio and spectrogram, incident reporting, ranger tracking, mapped interventions, and Guardian filtering capabilities. RFCx is expanding to monitor and conserve areas all over the world.

Rainforest Connection is in 10 countries on 5 continents protecting over 2,500 sq km of rainforest. We have been implementing this innovation around the world in an ever-evolving form since 2014. Through tremendous trial and error, RFCx has a very effective system that functions well time and time again to detect and stop illegal activities. For example, they work with the Tembé tribe in Brazil, and, because of the installed Guardians, they have been able to retake over 40% of their reserve from invasions. Each project has similar unique statistics. The greatest evidence of success and progress is the number of reserves around the world that are interested in implementing the RFCx system and the amount of media coverage RFCx receives. RFCx has over 40 projects in the pipeline waiting for funding for 2020. They partner with organizations such as Google, World Land Trust, World Resources Institute, USAID, National Geographic, The Cornell Lab, Conservation International, IUCN, AWS, SAP, and Hitachi that all support our work.