Over the course of his career, Peter Houlihan has hauled light traps across dense jungles to study insects, even climbing up trees to string them up in the canopy. Earlier this year, as he watched a group of scientists achieve the same goal in a matter of minutes by attaching a light trap to a device known as a canopy raft that was then deployed to the canopy using a drone, he says it “hit home in a game-changing way.”

“There’s a decade of my life that was just condensed into 15 minutes,” Houlihan, a tropical ecologist and executive vice president of biodiversity and conservation at California-based nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation, told Mongabay in a video interview.

Innovations such as these formed the core of a competition organized by the XPRIZE Foundation that aimed to identify technologies to automate rainforest monitoring around the world. Over the course of five years, teams comprising ecologists, engineers, DNA experts and Indigenous leaders innovated and competed for the $10 million prize. After a round of semifinals testing in Singapore in 2023 and the finals in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil earlier this year, four winners were announced last month.

Limelight Rainforest, a multidisciplinary team put together by Colorado Mesa University in the U.S., was announced as the winner of the competition. Two other teams — Map of Life Rapid Assessment and Brazilian Team — bagged second and third spots, while Swiss team ETH BiodivX was awarded the bonus prize.

Houlihan said that while the competition might have concluded, his team is working with partners around the world to ensure that the technologies identified through the course of the competition can be scaled up.

“Imagine being able to deploy a network of these rafts across an entire forest over millions of hectares while they are relaying data in real time,” he said. “Suddenly you have a living and breathing understanding of the biodiversity across an entire landscape.”

Peter Houlihan spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor about his biggest learning experiences, how he hopes the technology will be used, and his hopes for the future. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

 Mongabay: Now that the XPRIZE Rainforest competition has wrapped up, how would you sum up the last five years?

Peter Houlihan: When we started this journey, there was a vision of what this could look like if it was successful. But I didn’t have a picture of what the technologies would look like. I didn’t have an understanding of how this community would assemble around the prize. But throughout the process, there have been different moments that really were milestones where you could feel that this was more than technology. It had become a global movement. Today, it’s a community that’s working together to come up with solutions that span from the tropical biology research that we’ve been heavily involved in working all the way to state and federal governments, leaders of Indigenous communities, private sector, foundations and development banks.

Before our opening ceremony in Manaus [in Brazil] in July, everything had been so nonstop for such a long time and I just needed a moment to pause and reflect and process my thoughts. I took an Uber to the Amazon, and I sat down in the forest with a notepad. You know, we’ve been referring to this network of people around the world as our ecosystem. As I sat there, I just laughed because it is actually an accurate ecological term for what we have here. What you need for a healthy ecosystem is for all of the species and organisms to be interacting in a healthy way with one another in this environment. This movement did just that. It brought together the right people. It wasn’t just field biologists trying to figure out technology and the economics around the nature markets. We actually had people with so many different, diverse forms of expertise and knowledge and traditional wisdom.

Mongabay: I am curious to know what your initial vision for this competition was. How does it compare to what you achieved?

 Peter Houlihan: My background is in rainforest biodiversity monitoring and in coordinating logistics for field expeditions in rainforests around the world. I was very immersed in securing permissions, grants and funding and all of the logistics to get people in the forest to spend months at a time in remote areas, working with communities, collecting data by hand every single day for months.

I am a field person at heart. At any given moment, I would prefer to be in the jungle. But at the same time, you do this field work for months, you come back and analyze data for months or years. You spend possibly years writing papers. By the time that’s published, if you go back to follow up, perhaps that forest or that ecosystem might have been altered in ways that you wish you had gotten ahead of it.

When the pandemic hit, it extracted me from the forest because everything I was doing came to a stop. When I heard about XPRIZE Rainforest, I thought there had never been $10 million for biodiversity and rainforest monitoring technologies. I actually, for a split second, thought I could form a team. Then I thought it would be amazing to help on the inside to guide and shape this behind the scene.

I understood that we really had to condense the time of data collection and the speed of data analysis and the speed at which we’re able to communicate results in real time. If we’re to react to the challenges of our time, we don’t have decades to figure this out. We have, arguably in some areas, weeks, months, or just a couple of years. At that point, what I envisioned was the need to revolutionize the speed at which we can collect, analyze and report data. It was about imagining a different world we want to live in, and how we accelerate solutions towards that rather than just continuing incrementally within the same confines and structures of what we’ve always been doing.

On the first testing day of the semifinals in Singapore, it was just before sunset and I just pulled out a folding chair and set it down in the forest. I looked up and these drones were all over the place. I remember thinking to myself, “This is real.” Having that moment in Singapore and then in the Brazilian Amazon, at a totally different scale, it made me see that that vision had become a reality.

Mongabay: Having watched the teams compete and innovate over the years, what have been your biggest learning experiences? What were the biggest surprises?

 Peter Houlihan: We knew that there would be advances with the ways that sensors are affixed to drones and things like that. Just the nature of the task at hand that we were putting forward to the teams would have necessitated that. It has been amazing to see the advances with eDNA [environmental DNA] and some of the ways in which teams developed their approaches to sequencing in the field and amplifying tens of millions of reads within a day. On the first day of the finals, the first team to test detected jaguars. That was just on day one. There is no way, typically, that you would go on an expedition and, on day one, detect the presence of such an elusive animal.

The scalability is really what excites me because that was the intention behind the prize. It was 100 hectares [250 acres], 24 hours, and the teams had to prove what they can assess in that space and time. So getting to see these technologies being deployed and tested, I could see the next phase of implementation already and all the places around the world that are ready for these types of solutions.

The eDNA advancements were incredible. Our winning team, Limelight, has this light trap that they deploy on top of the canopy and a raft that lures in insects and can use AI and machine learning to actually identify in real time. My background is as an entomologist, and I did a lot of hauling light traps and generators in jungles all over the world including, at times, climbing trees to bring them up into the canopy. So to sit there in the base camp and see them latch on one of these light traps and just zip it across the top of the canopy and deploy it within a couple minutes, that hit home for me in a whole game-changing way. There’s a decade of my life that was just condensed into 15 minutes.

Imagine being able to deploy a network of these rafts across an entire forest over millions of hectares while they are relaying data in real time. Suddenly you have a living and breathing understanding of the biodiversity across an entire landscape rather than just being at one field station or in one community.

Mongabay: The competition had a strong emphasis on Indigenous collaboration. How did you see that helping the teams innovate better?

 Peter Houlihan: From the very beginning we knew that for this to be revolutionary, it needed to decolonize the way research and conservation is done. It can’t just be tech companies parachuting into the rainforest to benefit off of data. People have avoided working in certain areas for a long time because it’s complicated. We’d have to abide by these different laws and regulations. Well, certain laws and regulations are there because of the history of extracting knowledge, natural resources and IP, and profiting off of it in ways that don’t ever reach these communities.

At the very beginning of the prize, we actually established a working group with Indigenous leaders and reputable organizations that work with Indigenous communities all over the world. Every single document and guideline that was sent to the teams to fill out, we consulted with that group. It was just incumbent and within every aspect of the DNA of the prize that you need to be doing this in this way. These are the rules of the game. Over the years, especially as this advanced and we got to the finals, the teams partnered with Indigenous communities all over the world.

The composition of their own teams and their team members were represented by Indigenous and local communities. When we did semifinals in Singapore, people on many teams recruited team members from Southeast Asia. When we were working in Brazil, in particular, people recruited team members from the Brazilian Amazon. That was integral to their solution, and it was evident in the way that they were successful.

In the winning Limelight team, a significant part of the team is from the Ecuadorian Amazon and they provided so much insight. Our bonus prize winner [ETH BiodivX] was actually selected by the judges for the ways in which they went above and beyond with their collaboration with Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon and forming benefit-sharing agreements.

We had a team that was looking for water to collect samples of eDNA analysis. The area that we were in was a flooded forest, and there was water throughout this 100-hectare plot. But it was in different areas of the plot and some were further to get to and harder to access. There was an Indigenous member in that team who pointed out a palm that only grows in areas that are wet and actively have water. He asked them to fly the drone to that place. And sure enough, they flew to that area and that’s how they retrieved water. Up until that point, that team was really struggling to find water in this plot. I think the fusion of all of these different forms of knowledge and wisdom and expertise was definitely evident throughout.

Mongabay: How do you see these projects being used for real-life impact in the future?

 Peter Houlihan: XPRIZE Rainforest is the first competition at XPRIZE Foundation that actually has an impact phase built into it. For many of our other prizes, there is a market that’s taking off or there’s an industry that already exists in certain areas. That was not the case here. If you think back to 2019, there wasn’t a conservation technology industry and biodiversity credits were not being discussed. We knew that we would need to carry this forward after the solutions are tested so that teams don’t spend five years developing solutions and then they just sit on the shelf. We had no idea what that impact phase would look like. We just knew we’d have to continue the work after the prize.

Now, having worked with countries across the Americas, Africa and Asia over this five-year journey, we have partnerships with countries, states, provinces, communities and universities on different pilot projects and case studies for how these solutions can be scaled over a very large area. What we’ve done is strategically build out a timeline for between now and the end of 2025 which aligns really well with COP30 [the U.N. climate summit] in Brazil at the end of next year.

There are Indigenous communities that we’ve worked with in the Ecuadorian Amazon over the past few years. We’ll be partnering with several of those communities to scale these solutions and do capacity-building training and workshops so that the communities in the Amazon can actually have these technologies to monitor their own territories and have that data in real time. There are a few other pilot projects in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. We announced a partnership at COP29 with the National University of Singapore. All the teams that went through the semifinals in Singapore and advanced to the finals can return to Southeast Asia with these solutions. We have a few different pilot projects that will be kicking off in Thailand, Philippines and Malaysian Borneo and hopefully Indonesia. Then there are a couple of projects in the Congo Basin and hopefully Madagascar as well. When the prize was launched, the Global Biodiversity Framework didn’t exist. When that was adopted, it actually gave us a road map for where countries need to be by 2030. If you look through the Global Biodiversity Framework, there are so many areas that touch on the need for technology and innovation to accelerate.

If anything gives me hope, it’s seeing how the world can come together to accelerate solutions. Now we have solutions that are really incredible and applicable, and they’ve been designed specifically for this agenda. So how can we actually integrate these around the world to support countries in achieving their 30×30 goals? How can these solutions be deployed in a way that accelerates the baseline biodiversity assessments necessary to inform where new protected areas should be? That’s what the year to come looks like in our impact phase.

Mongabay: What’s next for the XPRIZE Foundation in the realm of biodiversity monitoring and protection?

 Peter Houlihan: Outside of the rainforests, there’s a lot of amazing activity going on. We launched our wildfire prize early in 2023. In 2025, we have the finals of our space-based detection track as well as the semifinals of our autonomous detection and response track for that prize.

In 2025, we’re aiming to launch a couple of different ocean prizes. One that’s been on XPRIZE’s radar for a very long time is coral reefs. I think the world has come to this agreement and realization that the climate scenario we’re already living in is far beyond what was ever anticipated in terms of the impact on our oceans. So we’re working to launch a massive prize on incentivizing solutions for more resilient, adaptive, heat-tolerant coral reefs around the world, as well as a prize that is focused on deep-sea biodiversity. We have two others. One is on decoding animal communications that we’re developing and another one on intercepting the illicit wildlife trade. This will focus on technologies that can be deployed for detecting wildlife products at different points of transit throughout the international trade.

If we look five years from now to 2030, I hope we’re looking back and we have many more successes along this way. If we’re successful enough, maybe I could retire [laughs].

Mongabay: What’s your hope for the future? What’s the best-case scenario in your head about how these solutions will pan out?

 Peter Houlihan: Thinking about 2030 and beyond, I can envision how these solutions will be scaled around the world. I hope that five years from now, we are looking back and there are all these different ways in which these solutions played a transformative role in shifting the trajectory that we’re on for the better.

If people are just tuning in right now for the first time, it feels like a moment of time of “Oh, wow, there’s these technologies.” But if we look at the growth of this movement specifically around innovation of new collaborations and the willingness to work together and drive these solutions, I am confident we’ll continue to make significant strides in important ways.

We need countries around the world. We need corporations. We need everybody to understand that these planetary crises are the crises of our home planet, of which we are living, breathing members. We need to figure out a more sustainable future. We have artificial intelligence. But we also have the human intelligence that got us here. I think we’re smart enough to figure this out. With the right incentives, we are going to figure it out.  People are going to need to be bold and audacious and realize that there is so much more to gain than the short-term gain of exploiting our planet for the here and now.

Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.

Banner Image: Limelight Rainforest, the team that won the first spot in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, developed a canopy raft fitted with sensors that was deployed on tree canopies using a drone. Image by Outreach Robotics. 

Five-year rainforest tech competition culminates with four winners