When Colorado Mesa University biology professor Tom Walla several years ago entered a team into an international competition aimed at developing ways to better assess biodiversity in rainforests, winning was the farthest thing from his mind.
“We didn’t start this to win, we started this because it was an opportunity to build a collaborative team to build something good for the rainforest,” he said.
Clearly that goal was met because the team based at CMU and led by Walla on Nov. 8 also achieved what he hadn’t contemplated. It bested about 300 other teams from 70 countries to win the XPRIZE Rainforest competition and the $5 million top prize.
Walla and some other CMU faculty involved in the project traveled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the honoring of the top-finishing teams, in connection with a G20 “social summit” event ahead of a Group of 20 meeting of nations there this weekend. The CMU team, Limelight Rainforest, previously had qualified as one of the top six finalists, winning it about $333,000 and making it eligible to compete in the finals in Brazil earlier this year.
Team members were notified prior to the event that they had finished in the top three, all of which receive financial prizes, but they didn’t learn until Nov. 8 how they placed. The Sentinel spoke to a few team members for this story ahead of the trip by some of them to the awards ceremony and the announcement that the team won.
Taylor Schmitz, a CMU senior and ecology student who was in Brazil for the finals competition, said, “I think we all felt really good about how we performed and so we kind of had this feeling that we did really well. But it was really cool to have the affirmative that we placed top three. So I was surprised, still, but I was also like, ‘OK, yeah, we did do good.'”
Said CMU biology associate professor and team member Johanna Varner, “No matter how it turns out, I think it’s hugely validating of the tremendous amount of work that every single person on the team has put in.”
XPRIZE carries out large-scale competitions with the goal of solving humanity’s greatest challenges. XPRIZE Rainforest was launched in 2019 with the goal of accelerating the innovation of novel technologies for rapidly and comprehensively surveying rainforest biodiversity to boost conservation efforts.
The CMU-led team qualified to participate in a semifinals competition in Singapore in 2023, after which the six finalists were named.
At the finals in the Brazilian Amazon, each team had 24 hours to deploy their technologies to remotely survey a 100-hectare (247-acre) rainforest plot without entering the test area, and then had 48 hours to analyze the test results and produce a biodiversity report.
According to an XPRIZE news release, Limelight Rainforest’s “sensor platform is designed to be deployed via drone to the rainforest canopy, the most under-researched layer of the rain forest, 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,” XPRIZE said.
Walla said in the release, “XPRIZE Rainforest gave us the funding, motivation, and collaborative community we needed to move this technology forward. Limelight has the potential to revolutionize the rate at which we monitor and assess biodiversity with technology that’s small enough to fit in a backpack. Compared to existing (DNA sequencing) 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.”
Walla told the Sentinel in a recent interview that he thinks the prize money the team won as a top-three finisher will be split among 52 team members, with some of them using the money for science, and some of the money will stay with the team, which is a nonprofit foundation, and can be used for more science.
“There is a great potential here I think to set the standards for biodiversity monitoring using the new technology. That means designing large-scale experiments to actually measure how tropical forests change in space and time when we disturb them.”
Walla said that getting into the competition, he didn’t really think the team had a chance of winning. Some early experiences only reinforced that notion.
“We failed at so many things,” he said as he laughed about setbacks that at least once brought him to tears.
He said that initially the team pursued the idea of using a drone to deliver a sensor device that he believes team members were calling a tree hugger, and was to be hooked to a tree and be able to go up and down it.
“That was my solution for about nine months and they failed. I crashed two drones,” Walla said. “I consulted with some professional drone people and they were like, ‘this is not going to work.’
“… I can remember standing in my driveway crying because of promises I made to people for a drone system that worked clearly did not work.”
But he said the team took a major step forward ahead of the semifinals by joining forces with Outreach Robotics, a drone team made up of graduate students in Canada that has done work using drones to deliver systems that can collect plants on cliffs in Hawaii. And someone came up with the idea of using drones to deliver the Limelight system to the rain forest canopy via a “tree raft.”
Walla said the team benefited from the addition of brilliant people to it who are problem solvers.
“Eventually, these problems, I didn’t solve them, they were solved by people that I met,” he said.
The team even picked up some members from other teams that didn’t advance in the competition.
Its dozens of members includes personnel from multiple universities and other organizations, multiple countries, and with expertise in a wide variety of disciplines. Within CMU, biology associate professor Denita Weeks led a DNA sub-team that included Schmitz; political science professor Tim Casey focused on integrating the technology with indigenous peoples and local communities; and computer science faculty Sherine Antoun and Karl Castleton, mechanical engineering associate professor Sarah Lanci and CMU Tech instructor Robbi Grimm also contributed to the effort. Local businessman Thaddeus Shrader of Bonsai Designs also is on the team, and Ryan Bixenmann, a CMU grad, is its chief of operations.
CMU students worked on the project both locally and in a few cases by participating in the semifinals and finals.
Said Schmitz, “I was really excited to be a part of it but I was also nervous because it was kind of my first introduction to work in the lab. Especially being an international experience, going somewhere unknown, doing things that are unknown. But Dr. Weeks is a really great teacher and it was a really great opportunity to learn quickly and especially learn in such a novel way, being out in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.”
Schmitz said her XPRIZE experience has gotten her interested in doing more work internationally. She hopes to eventually continue with her schooling, and possibly do further field or lab work, or both. She said working on the XPRIZE team was pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“There’s plenty more opportunities to come but nothing like XPRIZE,” she said. “I think (doing) research one day would be really cool, but being immersed in such a renowned ecosystem and doing work that benefits its future conservation was very inspiring.”
Said Varner, “This project has really provided a lot of opportunities for CMU students to apply their knowledge to a big global problem and to actually have those applications showcased in the global scale. So it’s not just sort of a pretend thought experiment that we’re doing in the classroom that never leaves the classroom on campus. It actually went out there and got field tested, and it got field tested against some of the best, most well-funded universities in the world.”
Walla said he appreciates the support from CMU, including its administration, throughout the competition, and is glad for the recognition on a global stage for the institution and its faculty and students.
“There’s a lot of people working really hard at CMU to make it awesome and we just don’t get many times like this when we shine as brightly with so many of us involved in a project of this scale,” he said.
CMU President John Marshall told the Sentinel this week in a prepared statement, “We’re incredibly proud of the work CMU faculty and students put into the multi-year XPRIZE Rainforest competition to positively impact the future of tropical rainforests. CMU standing on the podium in Rio at the G20 Social Summit and being acknowledged for this remarkable accomplishment is an example of our campus values in action.
“What’s even more meaningful is the experience our undergraduate students received working alongside faculty, both in remote places of the world and here on campus at Colorado Mesa University. This is a perfect example of the caliber of our faculty and the meaningful relationships built with students to build a model of the world we want to create.”
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