TECH4ALL: Saving Endangered Animals with Artificial Intelligence

Why should you care about the rainforest? It is one of nature’s most precious ecosystems and is critically essential to our survival, supplying more than 20% of the world’s oxygen and providing a home to up to 50 million species. However, the tropical rainforest and its rich biodiversity are at risk due to illegal deforestation. Nearly 18 million acres of rainforests are disappearing each year, reducing their coverage on Earth from 14% to only 6%. Consequently, every year of deforestation also leads to the extinction of 50,000 species. In other words, we could lose the entire Amazon in 50 years at this rate. Unless we take action now.

Together with non-profit organization Rainforest Connection (RFCx), Huawei is leveraging its advanced technologies to protect vulnerable species by developing a fully integrated ecosystem, including audio collection capabilities, storage services and intelligent analysis. In Costa Rica, the most biologically intense place on earth, there is one particular endangered species that plays an integral role to the overall health and biodiversity of the whole rainforest: the spider monkey. It disperses seeds across large areas, which propagates plants and trees, ultimately helping wildlife thrive. Using cloud-based AI, Huawei can track sounds in the rainforest to better safeguard spider monkeys from threats and improve conservation efforts of endangered species.

Upcycled retired Huawei phones are transformed into solar-powered rainforest monitoring devices called “Guardians.” Deployed throughout the rainforest, these sturdy devices collect environmental sounds and provide real-time alerts at all times of the day. For at least two years, they can endure extreme environments from high temperature and humidity to heavy rain.

With the high complexity of sounds in the rainforest, humans alone cannot sift through the massive amounts of audio data and provide accurate interpretations to inform quick and appropriate action. Using HUAWEI CLOUD AI, Guardians transmit the audio they continually collect to a secure back-end platform that efficiently stores and manages this information. An intelligent model built with HUAWEI CLOUD AI and the ModelArts development platform accurately analyzes the data and recognizes threatening sounds related to illegal logging such as electric saws and trucks. Through repeated testing and refining, the high-precision model can detect 96% of chainsaw events. Once detected, the system immediately reports the sound’s location to forest rangers for swift response and action. This significantly reduces ineffective deployment of forest rangers, as they can spend less time patrolling all areas of the rainforest and more on direct efforts in specific locations at immediate risk.

By the end of this year, Huawei and Rainforest Connection’s partnership expects to safeguard 6,000 square kilometers of rainforest and four billion trees, ultimately decreasing carbon dioxide emissions by 300 million tons. Conservation efforts don’t end here. Huawei is continuing to expand research to build another intelligent model that can monitor and interpret spider monkey sentiment. Gaining insight into the spider monkey’s behavior, daily habits and movement will better inform biologists and forest rangers of their activity and the surrounding habitat, so they can better protect the animal as well as other endangered species.

Technology is often thought of as an enemy of nature, but with its limitless potential, it can be used to safeguard nature and the Earth’s vast biodiversity. Huawei’s TECH4ALL initiative is about creating inclusive technology that not only benefits humans, but also the other living beings we share this planet with. Together with the help of AI, improved conservation efforts are protecting endangered species and helping sustain the health and wealth of natural resources that make our entire ecosystem thrive.

Learn more about TECH4ALL here.