Tree Saver - A Real Time Logging Detection

Every year ten of thousands of square miles of forests are being removed by illegal logging activities throughout the Earth’s rainforests.

Deforestation is one of the biggest sources of the the carbon emissions that cause climate change. Every year deforestation is responsible for more than 17% of all human-caused CO2 emissions—more than all the world’s planes, trains, ships, cars and trucks combined. It’s also a primary reason for the highest rate of species extinction since the age of the dinosaurs. In order to combat this, a system was developed to alert nearby rangers that illegal logging was happening nearby so they could intervene.

Project Design and Methodology

Tree saver is autonomous acoustic monitoring system that consists of three components.

• Field Recording System.

• Sound Analysis .

• Alerting and Visualization System.

Field Recording System

This component will be responsible for the detection and recording chainsaw activity and monkey screaming over long period. Since chainsaws have a loud and unique sound signature that isn’t found in the natural soundscape of the forest it’s easy to detect the noise as an anomaly—even up to a kilometer in the distance

System consist of the Intel Edison prototyping board/ Arduino prototyping board and a set of sensitive microphones to pick up and record sounds and to reject land-born environmental noise. With the sensitive microphones strategically positioned, geo-localization algorithms programmed in the prototyping board will be used to determine the absolute geographical location and direction of sound source using Grove Gps Modules.

Sound Analysis System

Chain Activity detected and recorded by the Field recording system will be sent to a cloud service platform for storage and analysis. This system will use the Intel Deep Learning SDK along with a data set of known Chain Activity,human intervene ,monkey screaming and to determine the logging or unusual activity.

Alerting and Visualization System

Once a chainsaw is detected, rangers are alerted via phone calls, SMS, email and push notifications with the location of the device that was triggered. Rangers can then intervene and ask the loggers to leave.

This data can be visualized in a Web App or Mobile App which helps to find out most prone areas which hence results giving more protection to particular Area or Trees.

What are you creating?

An IoT acoustic monitoring system that records sounds and sends it to the cloud for analysis to track illegal logging .

Why does it matter?

This system can be used for conservation as well as monitoring of Rain Forests which are oxygen to our habitat. Besides that it can used to monitor unusual activities on the forest.

Are you 100% committed to deliver a well documented project?

Absolutely, I,m truly committed to deliver such a project.