Forest Guardian

Pratyush Mallick: DIY Devices for Forest Monitoring in India

DIY India acoustics design illegal logging

In this episode, we speak to Pratyush Mallick, developer of Forest Guardian, a DIY , open source device used to detect illegal logging in forest spaces. Pratyush discusses the potential of the DIY/hacking community for building technologies to address environmental change, and the politics of implementing these technologies on the ground in Indian forests.

Interviewers: Michelle Westerlaken and Trishant Simlai

Producer: Harry Murdoch

Listen on Apple and Spotify.


This radio episode was produced by the Smart Forests project funded by the European Research Council. Smart Forests is led by Professor Jennifer Gabrys and is based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Header image: The Forest Guardian device. Image source: Pratyush Mallick [photo]. Retrieved 28 March 2022, from https://www.hackster.io/bhanudiehard/forest-guardian-267cb7

Smart Forests Atlas materials are free to use for non-commercial purposes (with attribution) under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. To cite this radio episode: Mallick, Pratyush, Michelle Westerlaken, and Trishant Simlai, "Pratyush Mallick: DIY Devices for Forest Monitoring in India", Smart Forests Atlas (2023), https://atlas.smartforests.net/en/radio/pratyush-mallick/. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10692165.

Related Tags