XPRIZE, which describes itself as ‘the world’s leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges’, announced the winners of its $10m XPRIZE Rainforest competition, sponsored by Alana Foundation, at the G20 Social Summit.
Team Limelight Rainforest earned the competition’s grand prize, taking home $5m for their ability to survey 100 hectares of tropical rainforest in 24 hours and produce the most impactful real-time insights within 48 hours.
Limelight’s unique technology involves drone-deployed multi-taxa monitoring sensors, including a novel insect light trap, that demonstrates what XPRIZE called, ‘remarkable performance to advance biodiversity monitoring and have a tremendous impact on conservation goals of the United Nations Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as it scales to be implemented across countries, states, Indigenous territories and national parks globally.’
The announcement comes at a time when roughly 64 per cent of the world’s tropical rainforest has been destroyed or degraded, and continues to be destroyed at a rapid rate, despite being home to half of all living animal and plant species on the planet.
Roughly 20 per cent of the Amazon has already been lost, and studies show that at 20-25 per cent degradation, the Amazon ecosystem could face a tipping point and irreversibly shift global climate.
Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots and essential in climate regulation, but consistently face deforestation for agricultural expansion, logging, mining and other industrial projects. Biodiversity globally is facing catastrophic loss at an unprecedented rate, with a recent study showing a startling decline in monitored wildlife populations, with the most drastic decline of 95 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Peter Houlihan, executive vice president, Biodiversity and Conservation at XPRIZE, said, “The future of life on Earth, including that of our own species, will depend on humanity’s collective ability to urgently understand the true value of nature on our planet and coexist with it. The technologies designed and field tested through XPRIZE Rainforest are capable of rapidly and remotely assessing the biodiversity and ecological insights of tropical rainforests at scale. In partnership with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, these tools are ideally suited for implementation to monitor, manage and protect tropical rainforests globally, and to accelerate the achievement of the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework by 2030.”
XPRIZE Rainforest launched in 2019 with a goal to accelerate the innovation of novel technologies that rapidly and comprehensively survey biodiversity and produce impactful insights to inform conservation efforts. Out of 300 teams across 70 countries, 13 teams qualified for rigorous Semi-finals testing in Singapore in 2023. Six competitors were identified to advance to the competition’s final stage which took place in July 2024 in the Brazilian Amazon.
Each team 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. In order 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.
Limelight Rainforest (formerly Team Waponi) is a multidisciplinary team of ecologists, robotics engineers, Indigenous scientists, and taxonomists who collaborated on the Limelight solution to win the competition.
The Limelight sensor platform is designed to be deployed via drone to the rainforest canopy, the most under-researched layer of the rainforest, to collect bioacoustic data, images of insects, and insect specimens that are attracted to the technology’s novel light trap.
The platform provides a real-time feed of data to its base technology, which rapidly identifies species using machine learning.
The technology is significantly condensing the amount of time needed to capture DNA from the environment and specimens for identification using a purpose-developed, field-based, portable molecular lab kit.
During Finals testing, Limelight identified over 250 different species and 700 unique taxa across both the animal and plant kingdoms from observations recorded during their 24-hour deployment, the highest amount of biodiversity observed by Finalist teams.
Thomas Walla, PhD, professor of biology at Colorado Mesa University and team leader of Limelight Rainforest, said, “XPRIZE Rainforest gave us the funding, motivation, and collaborative community we needed to move this technology forward. Limelight has the potential to revolutionise the rate at which we monitor and assess biodiversity with technology that’s small enough to fit in a backpack. Compared to existing technologies that may sequence 1,500 species over 2 years, Limelight has the potential to sequence 2,500 in 1 week. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve developed and are excited to get it into the hands of conservationists and researchers to help preserve invaluable ecosystems around the world.”