Dell Technologies Realize magazine Issue 2 | Page 34

TRENDS
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Topher White assembles Guardians using discarded smartphones .
The reserve was small ; he wasn ’ t far from the ranger station . Still , the three full-time guards were unable to keep a constant eye over a square mile of forest , making smallscale logging a tempting proposition for many living nearby .
An inveterate engineer , White is the kind of person who , even in the rainforest , happened to have some electrical components and an old phone on hand “ just for fun .” So he hacked together a rudimentary listening station and demonstrated it for the rangers . They liked it enough that White headed back a year later to set up a permanent system .
This proved its value in just 48 hours , when White received a GPS alert for chainsaw sounds on the other side of the reserve and headed out with rangers to investigate . They arrived at the location within minutes to find a small group of men from the local village chopping down trees . This unexpectedly rapid response was enough to send a message , White says : “ You can ’ t log here anymore , because if you do , you will get caught .”
Since then , White has raised more than $ 160,000 on Kickstarter to create conservation non-profit Rainforest Connection . The organization has now launched hundreds of smartphone “ Guardians ” in remote regions of forests all over the world , expanding monitoring capacities for local conservation groups from the Tembé tribe of the Brazilian Amazon to Peruvian government rangers in the Alto Mayo . Together , the efforts have protected more than 100 square miles of forest .
CREATING THE GUARDIANS While the operation has scaled , the Guardians are still built on the same smartphone bases . For one thing , it ’ s a small contribution to reducing the impact of the 350,000 or so phones discarded daily in the U . S . alone . For another , “ it ’ s actually a great little computer to write software for ,” White explains . “ It has all the sensors that we need , and it can connect to the cellular networks . Building something like that from scratch would be very hard .”
Instead , discarded smartphones are repackaged into a box with a powerful microphone , a battery reserve , and a solar panel specially designed to maximize the energy from the sun flecks that make it through the tree canopy . The Guardian contraption is then placed around 150 feet up a tree , accessing cell towers up to 12 miles away and detecting sounds more than a mile away .
Still , the innovative project faces its own set of challenges . “ It feels like launching a satellite to me ,” White says . “ The Guardians are in places that are so inaccessible , and they ’ re
PHOTOS BY BEN VON WONG