The CEO of a nonprofit that gathers sound to catch illegal activity in the rainforest says 5G technology can get high-quality audio into the hands of those who need it — fast

• Bourhan Yassin became the CEO of Rainforest Connection in 2022 after years of working in tech.
• The organization uses a device called the Guardian to collect rainforest audio and find danger.
• Technology around 5G could speed up audio delivery and make the group's work more influential.
• This article is part of "5G Playbook," a series exploring one of our time's most important tech innovations.

Around the end of 2016, Bourhan Yassin questioned whether he was on the right path. He had been working in the world of tech startups, most recently at MarkaVIP, a successful e-commerce company that brought him to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. But chasing growth and pleasing investors didn't exactly satisfy him.

"I realized I wanted to do something that had more meaning attached to it," Yassin told Insider. "I wanted to be a part of a greater cause."

Yassin, as he put it, "stumbled across" an organization called Rainforest Connection, which at the time was run by a team of three and looking for an engineer with a background in management and operations — someone like Yassin. He was invited by a cofounder to participate in a volunteer project in Costa Rica. 

Today, Rainforest Connection has a staff of 40 and uses sophisticated technology to monitor biodiversity, illegal deforestation, and animal poaching in countries including Kenya, Brazil, Tanzania, and Indonesia. But in 2016, it used donated cellphones to listen to the soundscape of forests. Yassin was impressed by the ingenuity and the way the local community embraced the technology. 

"The project really opened my eyes to how you can use your skills in tech to make a big difference," Yassin said. "I had never seen that before — to me, it was always about spreadsheets and PowerPoints. It was amazing to see the impact of the work on the ground." 

By 2017, Yassin had joined the nonprofit, and in 2022, he became its CEO. This year, Google recognized Yassin as a "leader to watch." 

Rainforest Connection gets a tech upgrade

A few years ago, Rainforest Connection switched from cellphones to a custom-made device called the Guardian. Today, these are installed in over 15 countries. The device sits on top of a tree canopy — from above, the configuration of solar panels that help charge it almost looks like petals. Guardian devices contain a sensitive external microphone that can capture "sounds even a human ear can't hear" at a range of 50 to 1,500 meters, Yassin said. 

Data picked up by Guardians is transmitted by either satellite or a digital mobile network to the Guardian Cloud Platform, where it is processed by machine-learning algorithms trained to identify the various priorities Rainforest Connection is monitoring. 

For example, the machine-learning model is trained with over 22,000 examples of chain-saw sounds. This helps it recognize the sound of illegal logging. Once that sound is identified, an automatic alert is sent to the cellphones of people monitoring the situation — often local community members — who can then intervene. 

5G could prove powerful for the organization's work

While Rainforest Connection was founded as a way to counter immediate threats such as logging and poaching, the nonprofit realized over time its immense library of sounds — over 100 million recordings — could be used for further good.

"We realized that it wasn't just about picking out the bad stuff in the soundscape," Yassin said. "It could also be about understanding animals and species' behavior. It could provide critical information for protecting biodiversity."

These recordings are available for free to anyone interested in using sound to monitor biodiversity. In one case, a Guardian picked up the sounds of two endangered species of parrots in Ecuador, which were then introduced to a key reserve area. 

While incredibly helpful, the acoustic data isn't always perfect. To access a 3G or 4G signal, Rainforest Connection points the Guardian's antennas toward the cellphone tower of a nearby town. The limited bandwidth capabilities of 3G and 4G mean that "we often have to compress our audio in a significant way, which renders it usable only for certain situations," Yassin said.

This is why Yassin is extremely interested in how 5G can transform what Rainforest Connection is capable of. The fifth generation of wireless technology, or 5G, is the newest cellular standard and known for its low latency and high bandwidth. 

Rainforest Connection is readying for a future in which 5G is more available than it is today; it has already created a prototype of the Guardian device that has a 5G-capable modem inside. In 2021, Rainforest Connection spent two weeks testing 5G-capable devices in Poland, where it had a project in the Białowieża National Park, considered a European biodiversity hot spot. The purpose of the test was to see how quickly and reliably the organization could get high-quality acoustic data for real-time biodiversity monitoring. These early tests suggested 5G could augment the work.

"When we connected the Guardian 5G prototype to a 5G tower, we were able to send some really high-fidelity audio at some amazing throughput speed," Yassin said. This ability could be especially helpful in situations where sounds are more difficult to register, such as when monitoring bats. 

"Audio is a fingerprint of what's happening in nature," he added, saying that 5G "facilitates the highest quality possible, which is important because then you can detect sounds that go beyond just a chain saw or a truck." 

Because 5G availability is still limited — especially in the rural spaces where Rainforest Connection works — Yassin thinks it will be several years before 5G is incorporated into most of the organization's rainforest projects, he said. But he could see it used earlier in spaces more likely to neighbor 5G cell towers. For example, Rainforest Connection has previously collaborated in Puerto Rico with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, where 5G coverage is expanding.

In a study published this year in Trends in Parasitology, a peer-reviewed science journal, scientists expanded on the good that could come from detecting natural sounds: In the paper, they detailed how the acoustic information gathered by Rainforest Connection could help researchers pinpoint changes in the location and behaviors of animals, which allowed them to monitor zoonotic disease. Higher-quality recordings would enable this type of work to expand.

Before he worked with Rainforest Connection, Yassin said he measured success through metrics such as funding. Now he thinks "the most important measure of success is how much impact we can create," he said.

He told Insider: "This translates into how much area we can cover, how much data we've collected, and how many people we've helped."