A student, a scientist, and an open invitation to the rainforest.

I'm a student at St. Mark's School of Texas, and I started Open Canopy because the tools researchers need to monitor rainforests are expensive, proprietary, and hard to replicate in the remote places where they're needed most.

My role is to design and build the toolkit — the low-cost 360° camera and audio nodes, the field guides, and the AI labeling workflows — and make every part of it open-source so any conservation team, anywhere, can use it.

The first deployment is being built in partnership with Andrés Ruzo for his research in the Peruvian Amazon.

Andrés Ruzo is a Peruvian-Nicaraguan-American geoscientist, National Geographic Explorer, and author of The Boiling River: Adventure and Discovery in the Amazon. He's best known for scientifically documenting the Shanay-Timpishka — a 4-mile stretch of Amazon river that runs hot enough to brew tea.

Beyond the river, his work focuses on protecting the surrounding rainforest, supporting indigenous stewardship, and building scientific infrastructure where it has never existed — through the Boiling River Project in Mayantuyacu, Peru.

Andrés came to me with a real research need: a way to monitor remote sections of his protected rainforest — wildlife, disturbance, illegal mining and logging, changes in the soundscape over time. That conversation became Open Canopy.