Monitoring Illegal Tree Cutting through Ultra-Low-Power Smart IoT Devices

Forests play a fundamental role in preserving the environment and fighting global warming. Unfortunately, they are continuously reduced by human interventions such as deforestation, fires, etc. This paper proposes and evaluates a framework for automatically detecting illegal tree-cutting activity in forests through audio event classification. We envisage ultra-low-power tiny devices, embedding edge-computing microcontrollers and long-range wireless communication to cover vast areas in the forest. To reduce the energy footprint and resource consumption for effective and pervasive detection of illegal tree cutting, an efficient and accurate audio classification solution based on convolutional neural networks is proposed, designed specifically for resource-constrained wireless edge devices. With respect to previous works, the proposed system allows for recognizing a wider range of threats related to deforestation through a distributed and pervasive edge-computing technique. Different pre-processing techniques have been evaluated, focusing on a trade-off between classification accuracy with respect to computational resources, memory, and energy footprint. Furthermore, experimental long-range communication tests have been conducted in real environments. Data obtained from the experimental results show that the proposed solution can detect and notify tree-cutting events for efficient and cost-effective forest monitoring through smart IoT, with an accuracy of 85%.