In 1994, American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis founded the XPrize Foundation to privately accelerate technological advancements. The first prize, worth $10 million, was announced on May 18, 1996, in St. Louis, MO. It was called the Ansari XPrize for Suborbital Spaceflight in honor of the family funding the competition. The prize was awarded to Mojave Aerospace Ventures on October 4, 2004, for being the first to send a privately built spacecraft into orbit twice within two weeks, with room for three passengers.

While this was the first XPrize, there have been several others since then, each drawing attention to technological needs that might otherwise remain out of the public eye. Some of these contests take a few months to complete, while others span several years. The most recent prize, the $10 million 2019–2024 Rainforest XPrize, was awarded to four teams with the goal of using technology to better understand rainforest ecosystems. The winning team, Limelight Rainforest, headed by Colorado Mesa University Professor of Biology Thomas Walla, received $5 million of the prize purse for first place.

Professor Walla, who has spent years studying biodiversity in rainforest environments, has always sought a way to develop a biodiversity gold standard that can be used to help indigenous people monetarily protect their ancestral lands. He explains that when a corporation looks at an acre of rainforest, they see only the value of the land as grazing space for cattle. Unfortunately, an unimaginable number of rainforests have been destroyed for logging and farmland, jeopardizing one of the most critical ecosystems on Earth.

When Professor Walla first heard of the XPrize, he, as a biologist, thought using drones to zoom around the rainforest canopy in search of species was an impossible task. However, he said that the brilliance behind the challenge “lies in trying to convince people that if they can look beyond the impossible task and focus for a moment on what we can achieve if we simply solve the solution, we could change the world.” So, he assembled a team of biologists, engineers, and indigenous people to implement a novel method of using drones to collect comprehensive rainforest data with a device called the Limelight.

The Limelight is a platform equipped with an array of sensors, cameras, and data-retrieving devices, delivered and placed within the rainforest canopy by a drone. After 24 hours, the Limelight is retrieved by the drone, which collects visual, audio, and live samples for environmental DNA (eDNA) sequencing. The drone is also used to place and hold the Limelight in bodies of water for similar data collection.

The team tested the Limelight platform in an Amazonian rainforest in Brazil. While they spent weeks perfecting the system, the data submitted to the XPrize was based on information collected by 10 drone-delivered Limelights over a 24-hour period. Within this framework, the Limelights inventoried 100 hectares of rainforest. The inventory included images that classified 250,000 insects, acoustically tracked the path of birds in the canopy, identified thousands of trees, and filtered 45 liters of water for eDNA analysis, which led to the generation of nearly 27 million sequencing reads.

Though originally skeptical about using drones to gather such data, Professor Walla was amazed by just how beneficial the technology proved to be. And clearly, so too was the panel of XPrize judges. With this system, Professor Walla envisions indigenous people having the tools necessary to present corporations with biodiversity data that demonstrates the economic benefits of preserving a natural rainforest outweigh the financial benefits of destroying it.

“We have entered a new frontier in the study of life on Earth,” Professor Walla said about the implementation of drones and technology in biodiversity studies. “We are closer than we’ve ever been to identifying that gold standard for biodiversity, and when we do, we can do great things. We are riding the greatest technological wave of our time.” Competitions like the XPrize shed light on both the issues and the solutions to the challenges facing today’s global community. Several ongoing XPrize competitions are poised to bring about positive change for the world, just like Professor Walla’s Limelight project.

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