NJIT Biologist Joins Semifinalists in $10M XPRIZE Rainforest Competition
A U.S.-based team of scientists joined by NJIT biologist Eric Fortune is inching closer to the $10 million XPRIZE Rainforest Competition’s grand prize for improving our understanding of rainforest ecosystems, having recently been named semifinalists.
The five-year XPRIZE Rainforest Competition was launched in 2019 to spur innovation of technologies used for better assessing biodiversity in remote rainforests that have yet to be extensively studied before, ultimately aiding in conservation efforts.
The 25-member group Fortune is part of, “Team Waponi,” is one of just 15 semifinalist teams from 10 countries remaining in the competition, funded by the Alana Foundation.
The team has received a milestone prize totaling $17,000 in recognition of their novel “LimeLight” device, which is designed to remotely assess the health of rainforest habitats through acoustic and photographic data collection.
“It’s been quite the journey so far. But I also feel the pressure,” said Fortune. “I absolutely love being in rainforests. My research takes me to these amazing places, and I have seen the effects of deforestation and climate change on habitats where I work.
“This competition is a special opportunity to develop equipment that can have a global impact.”
Though rainforests make up roughly 6% of the Earth’s land surface, they host approximately 50 million inhabitants — more than 50% of the planet’s biodiversity.
XPRIZE Rainforest’s global challenge has called for new scalable technologies that can quickly survey and produce accurate data about such vast life.
The catch is that the devices must work remotely, without the help of humans.
The challenge been a perfect match for Fortune, who has spent his career deploying special technologies in rainforest habitats to study everything from how electric fish communicate in the Amazon to the way plain-tail wrens sync their brains for duetting.
He first joined with Team Waponi’s leader, Colorado Mesa University biology professor Thomas Walla, through shared field research interests at the Yanayacu Biological Station, located in the forests surrounding Ecuador’s active Antisana Volcano.
The group has since spent the past two years developing a modular sampling device than can be deployed to the forest via drone. The device works by autonomously attaching to trees and adjusting itself at various heights using a conveyor system that Fortune designed.
Above: The original "LimeLight" deployed in Ecuador in August 2022, Team Waponi’s first milestone in demonstrating their new data acquisition technology. Credit: Thomas Walla
Equipped with specialized cameras and microphones, Fortune says LimeLight can capture detailed information about different species that inhabit different layers of the forest — including the forest canopy, the understory, the shrub layer and the forest floor.
“One of things we are using is a laser scanning technology, LiDAR, to record not only 3D maps of forest interiors, but fine details in the environment down to the wingbeat frequency of moths, mosquitoes and birds. Even though I work with this stuff, every day I am amazed that it is possible to identify the species and often the gender of flying animals on the basis of the wingbeat alone,” said Fortune. “And our audio recording systems have high sampling rates — 384 kiloHertz — which allows us to capture the vocalizations of bats and other hidden forest sounds we are unable to hear with our ears.”
The flurry of data collected by LimeLight is relayed by a mesh system for real-time analysis and species identification, carried out by machine learning algorithms the team is developing.
Above: Fortune and Team Waponi join an exclusive group of XPRIZE Rainforest’s semifinalists.
Fortune says that a key to LimeLight’s success is the accuracy and security of its data collection. Soon, LimeLight’s photographic and acoustic data — which is encrypted and distributed using blockchain technology — will be made available to armchair rainforest explorers everywhere, via a smartphone app.
“We want anyone, anywhere who wants to learn more about these beautiful ecosystems to have access the data. We also want them to be confident that what they are seeing online is actually happening in the forest, at the time and place we are saying it is, so data integrity is critically important,” said Fortune.
The next stop for Team Waponi? The semifinals’ competition in Singapore, scheduled to take place in spring 2023.
While semifinalists will have access to the city’s resources during the competition’s testing stage, they’ll be asked by judges to prove their technologies in an unsupported remote location within Singapore’s rainforests. Teams will have 24 hours to survey as many species as they can in 100 hectares, with only 48 hours to analyze the data and offer insights into the forest’s health.
Winners are expected to be named in 2024.
“Regardless of the outcome, my goal is to develop a technology that people use every day to monitor and maintain rainforests,” said Fortune. “That said, we’d be thrilled to win.”
To learn more about Team Waponi’s road to the finals, visit: www.teamwaponi.org or follow them on Instagram @TeamWaponi
