How recycled Android phones are helping save the Amazon rainforest

The Amazon rainforest is home to a quarter of the world's biodiversity. And deforestation is a serious threat to the tropical rainforest and the indigenous Tembé people who live there. It's difficult to spot illegal tree-cutting activity because of the expanse of the rainforest and the fact that the sound of the chainsaw gets drowned in the native sounds.

To preserve their forest, the Tembé people approached the non-profit Rainforest Connection for collaboration. This resulted in an innovative solution, which used recycled Android phones and Google's open-source machine learning model Tensorflow to track the sounds of illegal logging activity. Check out the details of the story here.

(Tip: Keep the audio on!)

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