Four college students have developed an application to protect forests in Romania against tree poachers, flooding and fires. The application uses a network of sensors to monitor humidity, sound, temperature and carbon monoxide levels.

The Politehnica University of Bucharest students built the application with Microsoft Corp. products, and they took first place in the recent Windows Embedded Student ChallengE. The group was one of 30 international teams who made the finals.

The application focuses on saving Romania's forests by tying into the contest theme: preserve, protect and enhance the environment. Illegal logging, which accounts for about 40 percent of the trees cut down in Romania, contributes to flash floods and landslides triggered by the country's incessant rains, according to Christian Pop, a 22-year-old third-year computer science student at the university, who led the team called 44 Tech.

The application works under low power requirements, establishing a network and routing protocol that connects the sensors to a central server. From there, alerts are sent to PDAs if the application recognizes the sound of a chainsaw cutting down a tree, for example.

The data also becomes available on a Web site where anyone can monitor Romania's latest forest conditions. "We used Microsoft's eBox as the central unit, the brain of the system, and the sensors are the ears and the nose," Pop said. "We can listen for the sounds of chainsaws to stop loggers from cutting down trees, or try to prevent fires by analyzing the data from sensors that monitor carbon monoxide, temperature and humidity."

High carbon monoxide levels or low humidity readings during hot days can trigger a fire alert, for example, he said.