Topher White, a 32-year-old from San Francisco, has repurposed smartphones to help protect the Amazon rainforest.

Less than a week ago, White's company, Rainforest Connection, raised $167,299 to fund its program to transform "recycled smartphones into autonomous, solar-powered listening devices that can pinpoint signs of destructive activity at great distance," surpassing its goal of $100,000, the company's Kickstarter page reports. Before the campaign, "we were entirely self-funded," White, founder and CEO of Rainforest Connection, told Fox News Latino.

The device looks like a flower and thus blends into its surrounding. Upcycled solar panel shards are connected to the smartphone in the shape of petals, providing energy for high-powered microphones that can transmit the sounds of poachers coming from distances up to two to three square kilometers (1.24-1.86 miles), according to the Kickstarter page.

"There's surprisingly little light that gets in under the tree canopy in a rainforest -- a few rays of light that last only a couple of seconds," White told FNL. "We have to trap whatever energy we can get to keep the phones powered up."

Currently, the phones can decipher the sounds of chainsaws, but in the future, White hopes the devices will recognize the sounds of trucks, which often represent illegal logging, gunshots and animals in trouble.

"You can spend a lot of money on people to actively guard small areas of the forest, or you can set up a bunch of these monitors and cover a much larger area," White said.

Once the transmission is sent to Rainforest Connection, "real-time alert is received by a responsible agent on the ground nearby enabling immediate intervention," Rainforest Connection's Kickstarter page explains.

Last month, Rainforest Connection announced its partnership with Equipe de Conservação da Amazônia, an Amazon conservation NGO in Brazil, and the Tembé people who live in the rainforest, Mongobay reported.

"There's really good cellphone service there," White told FNL. "The people there are on their phones and Facebook all day."

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Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar.

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