Rainforest Connection Reminds Us How Connected We Need to Remain to Our Planet’s Shrinking Biome

July 11, 2020 – While covering Collision from Home in June of this year I spoke to a number of youthful disruptive innovators who are trying to make their impact on the future. Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to them. The youngest at age 16 as well as the rest, all far younger than my 71 years, made me feel hopeful for the future.

In this posting, I talk about a conversation I had with Topher White, who for the past six years has been setting up listening posts in some of the world’s rainforests, capturing every bird, insect, animal, rustling leaf, and drop of rain, to create an acoustic picture of this important contributor to a sustainable planet.

Topher is academically a physicist, and a software engineer as well. While volunteering in Borneo at a wildlife sanctuary he became intrigued by jungle sounds. On a hike through the Borneo forest, he could hear chainsaws in operation and soon came across illegal loggers. That led him to his “aha moment” to use sound to help in conservation efforts.

You might think listening has limitations. But today, Topher’s bio-acoustic information is creating a rich database for researchers and policy wonks to address forest health, land management, and preservation of endangered species.

To launch the Rainforest Connection, Topher raised seed capital through crowdfunding and assembled a team and partners to begin implementing his acoustic forest warning system. Using older donated cellphones and solar panels, Rainforest Connection began putting these devices called RFCx Guardians, high up in trees to continuously listen to forest sounds. Now forest rangers in the countries where Rainforest Connection is operating can locate the sound of a chainsaw being started to converge on illegal logging operations.

I originally reported on Rainforest Connection at the launch of its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2014. So it was wonderful to reconnect at the Collision from Home conference where Topher was announcing the RFCx app, a platform that allows anyone to listen to the sounds of rainforests around the world. A second app, RFCx Ranger is also downloadable and designed for forest conservation officers to instantly receive realtime alerts of illegal logging and poaching of wildlife in protected forest areas.

I downloaded the RFCx app from the Google Playstore and began listening to the deafening sounds of cicadas on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, the call of a falcon in Peru, the sounds of the morning on the South African veldt, and the calls of Green Macaws and Howler Monkeys in a tropical preserve in Ecuador. Talk about communing with nature, it was a joyful experience.

Here are some highlights from the conversation with Topher on June 23rd.

Q: With deforestation at record highs, what are we doing wrong, and what can Rainforest Connection do to stop the destruction?

Topher: The scope of destruction in places like Brazil, which only a few years ago, was leading the world in rainforest conservation, is almost impossible for the average person to understand. To give you a perspective, since 1978, not just in Brazil, but across the entire Amazon River basin, more than 750,000 square kilometers, that’s equal to 289,000 square miles of the rainforest has been destroyed. Last year, Brazil’s rainforest destruction, under the Bolsonaro regime, achieved an unprecedented new high and the burning and illegal logging operations continue. For Rainforest Connection, the challenge is to engage with partners within rainforest countries who want to reverse this type of trend and preserve the forests. That continues to be our mission.

Q: What’s limited your ability to achieve greater success?

Topher: We rely on local partnerships to help us turn our sound alert network into an effective deterrence for illegal logging operations, and poaching. Needless to say political will at the top would make our work easier. But in places like Brazil, that’s not the case. The recent pandemic and economic crisis have seen an increase in the illegal burning of the forest as well as rising illegal logging operations. Governments seem to be unwilling to implement rainforest conservancy policies.

Q: Rainforest Connection is just one organization trying to stem the tide. So what else can the rest of us do to stem this ongoing destruction?

Topher: The work we are doing needs to become more widely known. The data we collect from acoustic monitoring needs to be disseminated to organizations working for forest conservation and restoration. The value of the forests left intact must be shown to be greater than what can be earned from burning and cutting the trees, and the clearing of the land for cultivation and rearing of livestock.

Rainforest Connection has always worked with local partners to develop sustainable, long-term strategies for the forest and endangered species. The message of this work needs to be more broadly disseminated so that government, NGO, and corporate leaders become better informed about rainforest preservation. Only then will we along with our current partners create a  willingness in the larger population to support and enact policies that protect forest ecosystems for their biological, social, and economic benefit, over unsustainable and destructive exploitation.

Q: Why did you pick bio-acoustic monitoring over other ways to survey the rainforest?

Topher: The idea of an Audio Ark of rainforest sounds and data came to me from that experience in Borneo while I was volunteering in an animal sanctuary. Listening to the natural sounds of the forest and then those made by humans handling chainsaws and guns made me aware of the potential to use sound and software to help save trees and the diversity of animals and plants living among them.

Q: Can you monetize the sounds of the rainforest to get the public to buy-in to the effort to implement permanent preservation?

Topher: There’s no doubt that putting rainforest preservation on the morning breakfast table would be a great way to get public buy-in. We can do this by bringing the sounds of the rainforest to consumers buying products produced in the forest.

Sustainable plantations exist today in harmony with rainforests. We need more of them. Rather than monocultures where native trees are cleared and a particular crop is planted, operators of sustainable plantations within the rainforest environment are trying to fit in with nature.

Consumers can read on the product label that the coffee or cocoa they buy is produced in a sustainable way, but to fully appreciate those coffee and cacao plantations that produce the beans, we can bring the sounds of the forest to them by featuring the downloadable RFCx app making that morning cup of java or cocoa more meaningful.

Q: How many countries are using the RFCx Guardian technology today?

Topher: Currently, we are working in 10 countries with plans to expand to 14, and growing our acoustic real-time surveying from 3,300 square kilometers to 6,000. It’s something and nothing when you look at the overall size of the challenge so we have a long uphill battle ahead of us.

Q: Where does AI come into the RFCx Guardian and the phone apps?

Topher: As the technology has evolved, we have been able to add machine learning using Google’s TensorFlow platform which can detect patterns in the collected sounds from the sound of human voices talking, to footfalls of animals that normally don’t vocalize very often. With listening stations positioned close enough to cell towers, we can differentiate almost any sound coming from the rainforest. And with the addition of AI we can listen to years of recorded sound and build a library of patterns of various species and activities and use this for identification in real-time. Suddenly, we are becoming a big data organization that holds prospects for research into the current state of rainforests around the world.

Our conversation went on for nearly three-quarters of an hour and I was sorry to see it end. As readers of 21stcentech.com, I hope you can be instrumental in spreading the word and downloading the app.

A ray of hope since my conversation with Topher. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation yesterday reported that foreign investment firms were putting pressure on the Bolsonaro government in Brazil to combat deforestation or see divestment happen.

Bolsonaro in response has issued a decree to use the Brazilian military to enforce a ban on fires in the Amazon basin for the next 120 days. This action follows a recent report that states the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest this year alone has gone out of control. In the month of June alone rainforest destruction rose by 10.7% compared to the previous year, and it is up 25% over 2019 in just the first six months of 2020.