‘We have incredible & applicable solutions’: Interview with Peter Houlihan of XPRIZE

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.   Peter Houlihan, executive vice president…This article was originally published on Mongabay