They're not for talking but for tracking. Brazil is outfitting trees in the Amazon rainforest with inconspicuous mobile phones in an effort to track and curb illegal logging, according to The Independent.
The technology, called Invisible Tracck, sends location data once the logs are within 20 miles of a mobile phone network, alerting Brazil's environment agency to stop the illegal timber. The technology was developed by Dutch digital security company Gemalto. Batteries on the mobile phones last one year and are designed to withstand the rainforest climate.
The mobile phones will allow Brazilian officials to track trees in real time rather than relying on slower traditional means of tree tracking like satellite images. "The rainforest in Brazil is approximately the size of the United States, so it's impossible to monitor each and every acre," Ramzi Abdine, general manager of Cinterion M2M, the wireless technology arm at Gemalto Latin America, told The Independent.
Though deforestation in the Amazon is remote sensing.
