- Contact Sales
- +852-800-931-122
Background
Known for its beauty and for the promise of adventure it offers tourists around the globe, Palawan is a long, narrow island in the southwest Philippines that’s home to a rich array of flora, fauna, and marine life.
Accounting for the bulk of the nation’s forest cover, the Palawan rainforest is considered to be the last ecological frontier in the archipelago nation. It not only plays a crucial role in maintaining the ecological balance of the entire region, it also ensures that local people have sufficient clean drinking water and is pivotal in preventing landslides. As one of the world's 35 biodiversity hotspots, the rainforest is home to various rare species, including the Philippine forest turtle, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists as a critically endangered species, and binturongs, a vulnerable species famed for a distinctive odor that’s similar to hot buttered popcorn.
Challenges
With the continued encroachment of agricultural and residential land, the prevalence of commercial and illegal logging, and frequent forest fires, Palawan loses about 5,500 hectares of rainforest every year – the equivalent of 7,700 football fields. Moreover, forest rangers patrolling the rainforest have an extremely dangerous job as illegal loggers often carry weapons – it’s estimated that from 2001 to 2019, the death of 18 rangers can be attributed to illegal loggers.
Solutions
A new monitoring system comprised of mobile devices and AI powered by HUAWEI CLOUD has been deployed to prevent illegal logging and animal poaching in five protected areas across Palawan: Cadlao Island, Maranlao, and Pasadena in El Nido, and New Guinlo and Pancol in Taytay. Based on the HUAWEI CLOUD AI services and ModelArts, an intelligent model is developed to accurately recognize the sounds of the electric saws and trucks used by illegal loggers.
Powered by solar panels, this Rainforest Guardian system comprises old cell phones that monitor and record sounds of human activity, like chainsaws and vehicles, and capture data on animal behavior patterns. Identified by AI, forest sounds and data are uploaded to cloud on the Smart Communications’ network and then sent to forest rangers via RFCx's mobile app. DENR forest rangers receive real-time alerts of sounds from chainsaws, trucks, and other indicators of forest destruction so that they can take action quickly.
Benefits
Forest Guardian system can be quickly and easily adapted to more countries and more scenarios. In 2020, it is expecting that the system will more than double the amount of forest it covers from 2,500 km2 to 6,000 km2. RFCx estimates that the amount of forest protected by the system will boost CO2 absorption by 30 million tons, which is the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. RFCx and Huawei will also continue to optimize the sound monitoring platform in 2020 by adding web and mobile interfaces and developing an API for aggregating sound data from various sources. This will help AI learning models capture and analyze audio on a much greater scale, so the solution can better monitor the health of the ecosystem and more effectively protect endangered species and their habitats.
