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EcoVoice: The Citizen-Powered Early Warning System for Biodiversity

Elevator Pitch

Turning every smartphone into a professional-grade acoustic monitoring tool to democratize environmental protection and give ecosystems a heartbeat.

🌍 Inspiration

2024 was the hottest year in human history, putting up to one million species at risk of extinction. The planet is actively trying to communicate this crisis to us, but its voice is fading into silence. We realized that combating the climate dilemma isn't just about reducing emissions; it's about paying attention to the intricate, fragile balance of life that already exists. We built EcoVoice because we believe the next big solution to the climate crisis starts by simply stopping... and listening.

📱 What it does

EcoVoice is a decentralized, mobile-first environmental monitoring platform. It turns an ordinary smartphone into a powerful acoustic sensor.

• The Ecosystem Heartbeat: The app features a live, dynamic UI that calculates the Acoustic Diversity Index (ADI) in real-time, displaying a "heartbeat" of the local environment alongside local temperature anomalies.
• AI-Powered Analysis: By hitting the "Listen" button, users capture environmental audio. Our backend uses AI to identify specific species calls, timestamps, and confidence scores.
• Automated Action: If a critically endangered species is detected, or if an ecosystem's health score drops drastically, the platform automatically generates a conservation alert and drafts an email with structured data to be sent to local NGOs.

🎯 How We Addressed The Challenge

EcoVoice was purposefully built to tackle the core themes of the Climate Change-Makers Challenge, specifically Biodiversity & Nature-Based Solutions and Climate Technology & Infrastructure. More importantly, we designed the platform strictly through the challenge's Four Lenses:

👁️ A Two-Eyed Seeing Approach

This is natively built into our app’s UI. On specific species profiles, we do not just display Western academic science (like IUCN Red List data and population graphs). We place Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) right alongside it on equal footing, sharing direct holistic observations from the indigenous communities who have stewarded these lands for millennia.

⚖️ An Equity & Justice Lens

We democratize the collection of ecological data. Instead of relying solely on well-funded western institutions to survey environments, EcoVoice allows historically marginalized or underfunded communities to prove the ecological value of their own lands with scientific rigor.

⚙️ A Systems Approach

Ecology is deeply interconnected. Therefore, our backend doesn't just look at bird calls. It calculates a holistic health score by merging the acoustic ADI data with satellite vegetative health (NDVI) and conservation statuses, feeding this matrix into a Large Language Model to synthesize an urgent, plain-English ecological narrative.

⏱️ A Practical Lens

We don't have decades to manufacture and deploy specialized hardware sensors across the globe. EcoVoice addresses this by using the hardware already sitting in billions of pockets worldwide. It is an immediately actionable, highly scalable solution.

💻 How we built it

• Frontend: We built a premium, visceral user experience using React Native and Expo. To make the climate data feel alive and urgent instead of like a static spreadsheet, we utilized complex Reanimated fluid animations (like the pulsating ADI heartbeat and magnetic CTA buttons).
• Backend: We built a high-performance Python FastAPI architecture.
• AI Integration: Audio spectrograms are processed by the BirdNET AI model for accurate species classification. The ecosystem health metrics are then fed into an advanced Large Language Model (Claude/Gemma) to automatically synthesize readable environmental narratives and draft NGO alert emails.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of making complex climate data visceral and emotional. Features like the "Locally Silent" memorial—which tags species that haven't been heard in an area recently and asks users to "Bear Witness" by scanning for returning calls—bridged the gap between cold biological statistics and human empathy. Furthermore, seamlessly integrating Indigenous Knowledge (TEK) into a modern tech stack was a major structural win for our team.

📖 What we learned

We learned that the technology required to build a global ecological early-warning system already exists; what is missing is the connective tissue. We learned how to synthesize highly complex datasets (acoustics, satellite imagery, biological data) into single, actionable data points that the average citizen can act upon.

🚀 What's next for EcoVoice

Our next step is scaling our Community Protection Zones feature. As citizen scientists log multiple recordings in the same clustered area, we want the platform to auto-designate and lock in these locations, instantly providing NGOs with the acoustic evidence they need to fight for formal, legal land protection.

💡 Tips for submitting:

• Attach screenshots of the Home Screen (showing the pulsing UI/Heartbeat).
• Attach screenshots of the Species Screen (highlighting the Two-Eyed Seeing / Traditional Knowledge section).
• Add a link to your 4-minute demo video.

Built With

• birdnet
• claude
• fastapi
• nextjs
• react