image: A team of scientists, robotics engineers and naturalists has won first place and $5 million in an international biodiversity competition.
Credit: Cat Kutz
Robert Guralnick, curator of bioinformatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is a member of an international team that won first place in the five-year XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The winners were announced Friday, Nov. 15 at a summit held in Rio de Janeiro. More than $7 million was awarded to the top-ranked teams, with $5 million going to the first-place winner.
XPRIZE is a non-profit, solutions-driven organization that has hosted large-scale competitions to solve humanity’s greatest challenges since it was established in 1994. The XPRIZE Rainforest competition kicked off in 2019, hosting 300 teams across 70 countries. The collective goal of each participant was the acceleration of technological innovation to improve the speed and precision of biodiversity surveys in support of global conservation efforts.
In the final stage of the competition, six finalist teams had 24 hours to deploy their technologies, remotely survey a 100-hectare test plot of tropical rainforest without physically entering the test area, and produce a biodiversity analysis report within 48 hours following the deployment. To win the competition’s grand prize, teams were also tasked with demonstrating scalability to effectively disrupt the often lengthy, laborious and resource-intensive process of data collection and analysis.
“It was such a massive collaborative effort,” Guralnick said. “I have never been involved in such a high-pressure situation, where one team does so much work to produce high-quality data, analytics and insights.”
Guralnick is a member of the Limelight Rainforest team, whose solution to the challenge was to create a monitoring device equipped with lights, audio recorders, cameras, insect traps and collection reservoirs. During the competition, each of ten Limelight devices was transported by drone and deposited in the forest canopy. At sundown, the lights were activated, creating clear beacons that attracted insects within the 100-hectare plot.
This strategy got them through the semifinals hosted last year in Singapore. The team made several tweaks and improvements to the collection apparatus ahead of the finals competition that took place in Amazonas, Brazil this April. The alterations enabled them to create an even more detailed snapshot of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystem.
Team members were brought on at various stages of the competition. Florida Museum researchers Raphael LaFrance and Nick Gardner also joined the Rainforest Limelight ranks, as did former University of Florida Ph.D. student Caitlin Campbell. Niyomi House, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum, and Julie Allen, former Florida Museum Ph.D. student and current professor of biology at Virginia Tech, played equally indispensable roles.
During finals, the onboard camera systems photographed and automatically classified 250,000 insects in just 24 hours. Team members also used canopy mapping software to identify thousands of trees and piloted drones to collect water samples from the forest floor. Because organisms are constantly shedding genetic material into their environment, team members running an onsite genetic lab were able to sequence isolated strands of DNA suspended in the water samples and use it to identify many of the organisms that lived nearby.
The team used the Limelights’ audio recorders to automatically identify birds, using a birdsong database created in partnership with Indigenous bird guides in Ecuador.
Though the express goal was to measure as much biodiversity as possible, Guralnick said devices like the Limelight and others developed for the rainforest competition have the potential to go far beyond static inventories.
“One of the questions we want to answer is not so much what’s out there, but what services the forest is providing to animals,” he said. “For example, we can detect buzz feeding of bats in and around the site, which is an indication that it’s a high-quality area.”
By mapping the position of each monitoring device, the team could also triangulate the movement of birds and track bats as they searched for food.
The rainforest competition was developed to address the critical need for rapid biodiversity inventories in areas that remain poorly studied or are threatened by development. Devices like the Limelight will improve the accuracy of environmental assessments, make it easier to identify the ecosystem services provided within a plot of land and monitor ecosystem health in even the most remote areas.
“Our ability to deploy monitoring devices to explore the world is just in its infancy,” Guralnick said. “We’ve never before had the ability to get this type of dense, real-time, on-the-ground information on what’s happening in our ecosystems at this scale. When it comes to automated monitoring, we're learning to walk after crawling for a decade. I wonder what's going to happen when we can run.”
Visit the Limelight Rainforest’s website to learn more about the team and the technologies they’ve developed.