The remarkable drone succeeded in comprehensively surveying 100 hectares of rainforest in a single day.
The winners have been announced in a $10 million competition put on by XPrize Rainforest to build devices that could survey 100 hectares of rainforest in a single day. The results are a testament to the growing conservation power of tools such as drones, DNA samplers, audio and video recorders and artificial intelligence, especially when paired with old-fashioned human ingenuity and the pressure to save these forests before it’s too late.
The $5 million top prize went to a team whose drone-delivered tree-top labs identified 700 different types of animals and plants, including 250 distinct species over a 24-hour period (plus two days to analyze the data) while exploring a section of rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon.
Developed by the U.S.-based nonprofit Limelight Rainforest under the leadership of Colorado Mesa University tropical ecologist Thomas Walla, the devices combine insect traps, audio recorders and cameras into a constellation of gadgets suspended in a lightweight lattice of rods. A drone uses a robotic hand to gently set one of these little laboratories into the top of a tree. Illuminated at night to attract insects, the constellation of devices resemble small lanterns floating in an ocean of trees.
“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,” said Walla. “Compared to existing technologies that may sequence 1,500 species over 2 years, Limelight has the potential to sequence 2,500 in 1 week.”