Tropical rainforests are one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Yet the ability to fully survey them is hindered by limited accessibility and sheer size.
For someone in, say, Chicago’s western suburbs, it’s a quandary that may seem a little removed, with the nearest rainforest more than 2,000 miles and an ocean away. But work to find the solution is going on right here in the Midwest, including at Lisle’s Morton Arboretum.
A team of experts from the arboretum, the Illinois Institute of Technology and Purdue University is competing in XPRIZE Rainforest, an international contest to develop the most promising technologies for bettering the world’s understanding of rainforest biodiversity.
The five-year, $10 million purse competition launched in 2018. Now nearing the end of its run, only six teams remain in the contest — including the local group, which has dubbed its effort, “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Over the next few months, the final winning team or teams will be announced. Regardless of who snags the top prize, the real reward and value of the venture has been in the work, competitors say.
“Really, the goal of what XPRIZE is trying to do … (is) get excitement going for this field and get people innovating, to get people developing,” said Matthew Spenko, Illinois Tech professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and one of Welcome to the Jungle’s two dozen or so team members.
The competition is a brainchild of the XPRIZE Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes technological development through inventive prize contests. Since it was founded in 1994, the foundation has repeatedly offered multimillion dollar awards to inspire innovation in environmental science and other fields that range from the space industry to health care.
Past XPRIZE contests have asked competitors to convert carbon emissions into usable products, advance deep sea technologies for ocean exploration and even develop means for harvesting fresh water from thin air.
For XPRIZE Rainforest, the charge is similarly ambitious: develop cutting-edge technology to improve our means of surveying and monitoring all of the flora and fauna found in a rainforest.
When XPRIZE launched its rainforest competition, Welcome to the Jungle came together “organically” to take on the challenge, Spenko said.
“We thought it was a great opportunity to sort of meld technology with tree science and biodiversity,” Spenko said. “We built the team out from that.”
Other team members include arboretum senior conservation officer Chai-Shian Kua, former director of the arboretum’s Center for Tree Science Chuck Cannon, faculty from Purdue University, several area graduate and undergraduate students and indigenous researchers.
Other contributing institutions include Natural State, a Kenya-based nonprofit dedicated to global nature restoration, and Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China.
Initially, some 300 teams showed interest in having a go at XPRIZE Rainforest, Spenko said. That number dropped to 34 by the quarterfinals, 13 by the semifinals and is now down to six for the finals. Alongside Welcome to the Jungle, teams from Brazil, Switzerland, Colorado, Connecticut and Spain are finalists.
Over the past five years of competition, teams locally and around the world have been devising, testing and perfecting solutions to the XPRIZE Rainforest challenge.
For the final round of competition, finalists were sent to Brazil’s Amazon rainforest this past July to test their solutions in real world conditions. To do so, the task, on paper at least, was simple. Teams were given 24 hours to deploy their technologies in remote portions of the Amazon, then they were allotted another 48 hours to take the data they collected and produce real-time insights.
Welcome to the Jungle’s answer to the XPRIZE Rainforest challenge was born of blending mechanical tools with biological processes.
Essentially, the team devised a drone that places monitoring technology directly into the rainforest’s canopy. Technology includes visual sensors to capture pictures of animals passing by, acoustic sensors to capture sounds of the surrounding rainforest and a filter to trap DNA material — think shedded skin or hair — in the air.
The idea is that once technology is deployed, data would be collected autonomously and then, after a period of time, sensors would be retrieved by drone and returned to scientists to extract and evaluate information.
“It’s a multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Kua, adding that Welcome to the Jungle also used mapping and artificial intelligence technologies to supplement data collected from drone-deployed sensors.
The team returned from the Amazon earlier this summer and in anticipation of XPRIZE Rainforest soon drawing to a close, recently held a special local demonstration of its solution at the arboretum’s grounds. The tree-focused botanical garden served as a stage for showing how they fashioned drones to deftly drop monitoring technologies into treetops.
Big picture, the ultimate goal of XPRIZE Rainforest is to come out of the competition with a group of novel technologies that are ready for practical use in the field, Kua and Spenko said. Ideally, devices would eventually be so accessible that they could be deployed in rainforests and maybe even other ecosystems around the world that are not as easily reached or monitored on a regular basis, they said.
“If you can easily walk or drive to where you want to go, you don’t need this technology,” Spenko said. “But if you want to assess a dense rainforest or you want to get to the side of a mountain or over difficult terrain, that’s where (these solutions) really shine.”
From a conservation standpoint, that’s important because “we have to first understand what we have” to gauge the full impact that human activity is having on the environment, Kua said.
Tropical rainforests, while covering just 6% of the planet’s land surface, are home to more than half of the world’s known species, according to the National Park Service. However, deforestation and forest degradation are threatening the crucial habitats worldwide, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which tracks biodiversity around the globe.
Having tools that can assess what is and may be lost even in the most dense and remote areas of the planet means that conservation efforts can be directed to where they’re needed most.
That’s the kind of reach and impact Kua and Spenko imagine for teams’ XPRIZE-inspired solutions, when the nitty-gritty of competing is all said and done.
The Associated Press contributed.
