Trinity Biology Professor Competes in the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition

Tomas Hrbek, Ph.D., Trinity’s Cowles Distinguished Professor of Biology, and his fellow Map of Life Rapid Assessments (MOLRA) teammates placed 2nd in the international XPRIZE Rainforest Competition, winning $2 million. The prize money will be used by the Yale-based MOLRA team to expand its biodiversity work around the world.

Launched in 2019 and funded by the Alana Foundation, XPRIZE Rainforest is a 5-year international competition with a total prize of $10 million (U.S.) divided among the winning teams. The goal is to foster the development of autonomous and innovative technologies to map the biodiversity of tropical forests and bring these technologies to the market. The competition highlights the importance of collaborative and interdisciplinary work necessary for biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource use solutions. XPRIZE Rainforest aims to accelerate the transition to sustainable and fair bioeconomies aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Hrbek joined the Yale-based MOLRA team in January 2024, assuming the role of co-eDNA team lead. His lead teammates included Yale University ecology and evolutionary biology professor Walter Jetz, Ph.D.;  Rutgers University ecology, evolution, and natural resources professor Julie Lockwood, Ph.D.; and senior conservation ecologist at the Field Museum Natural History Nigel Pitman, Ph.D.

“Joining the MOLRA team and contributing to developing bleeding-edge tools for biodiversity surveys and analyses was one of the most rewarding enterprises I participated in as a scientist,” Hrbek says.

MOLRA was one of more than 300 teams from different countries that participated in the initial phases of the XPRIZE. After five years of intense stages, including the semi-finals in Singapore in June 2023, six teams reached the final, held in July 2024 in the Tumbira community, on the lower rio Negro, near Manaus, Brazil. The finalists included groups from Brazil, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, with team members from countries across the globe, each presenting different solutions for collecting and analyzing biodiversity data.

The finalist teams were challenged to map the biodiversity of 100 hectares of rainforest in just 24 hours without entering the forest. They used innovative technologies such as drones to map the vegetation and collect forest sounds and environmental DNA and employed portable sequencers to read environmental DNA. Then, over the next 48 hours, the teams analyzed the data using technologies such as artificial intelligence and bioinformatics, transforming the data into detailed insights and highlighting the potential of tropical forests for conservation and bioeconomy.

“Competition in the finals was intense but amazingly smooth. Our team was the smallest and well organized, calmly resolving challenges and overcoming the inevitable hurdles,” Hrbek says. “I was really impressed with how efficiently we could collect and analyze environmental DNA data and how seamlessly we were able to combine it with soundscape and visual analyses to produce a comprehensive report on the biodiversity of the lower rio Negro around the Tumbira community.”

During the finals, Hrbek’s team was able to detect the giant and silky anteaters in their water samples.

"In the thirty years that I have been doing fieldwork in the Neotropics, I have seen the giant anteater only a handful of times and never the silky anteater,” Hrbek says. “This made me realize we already have all the tools necessary to carry out efficiently and rapidly standardized and comprehensive biodiversity surveys. The only thing we lack is the political will to actually conduct these surveys and then to turn them into actionable conservation and climate mitigation policies.”

The final award ceremony was held on November 15, 2024, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of the activities prior to the G20 Leaders Summit, which focused on strategies for building a just world and a sustainable planet. The award ceremony took place on the eve of the visit that President Joe Biden and Brazilian Nobel prize-winning climate scientist Carlos Nobre made to Manaus, the capital of the Amazonas state in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, to discuss the future of Amazonian biodiversity conservation.