In this Smart Forests Radio episode, we speak with Tom Bewick, former Peru director at
Rainforest
Foundation US and currently an international project specialist at Nature4Climate. The conversation focuses on the
Rainforest
Alert
, a community forest
monitoring
system in the Peruvian Amazon that Tom co-developed during his time at the
Rainforest
Foundation. The
Rainforest
Alert
integrates smartphone technologies, open data
deforestation
alerts like Global Forest Watch, offline
GIS
,
drones
, and
satellite
imageries to support Indigenous-led
monitoring
and protection of their territories. Tom discusses how Indigenous communities use the system for their monthly patrols—detecting
deforestation
activities, patrolling sites, recording evidence, and collectively deciding on a course of action. He also comments on the implications of such a real-time
alert
system for the intervention process,
governance
structure, and data ownership.
Interviewers: Kate Lewis Hood and Jennifer Gabrys
Producer: Harry Murdoch
Listen on Apple, Google, 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.
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: Bewick, Tom, Kate Lewis Hood and Jennifer Gabrys, "Rainforest Alert: Indigenous Monitoring in the Peruvian Amazon", Smart Forests Atlas (2024), https://atlas.smartforests.net/en/radio/rainforest-alert. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10629118.
Header image: A community patroller operating a drone. Image source: Rainforest Foundation US [image]. Retrieved 20 December 2023, from https://rainforestfoundation.org/