Yale-based Map of Life Rapid Assessments team was awarded $2 million after placing in a competition focused on biodiversity assessment. 

The team placed second in the Rainforest competition, organized by XPRIZE, a non-profit organization that organizes public competitions for technological developments that will benefit humanity. Map of Life developed a database to help scientists, researchers and conservation groups to better understand biodiversity trends and protect endangered species. 

The heart of Map of Life is actively assessing the status of different species in specific areas of the world. Over the past years, to go beyond model-based predictions, the team has added a novel Rapid Assessments, or MOLRA, technology. The team then leveraged the combination of models and local sampling for the XPRIZE Rainforest competition.

“Our survey technology involves sending a fleet of semi-autonomous drones into a site to collect visual, audio, and environmental DNA (eDNA) samples which are then processed through our state-of-the-art machine learning workflows to retrieve species identifications, site characteristics, and other important insights,” Tamara Rudic, team member, wrote to the News.

According to Walter Jetz, director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, the Map of Life went live around 12 years ago.

While the use of drones for wildlife data collection is not entirely new in biodiversity research, MOLRA sets itself apart from other technologies by blending species distribution knowledge with cutting-edge sample processing methods. 

The XPRIZE Rainforest competition launched in 2019, and the MOLRA team, in collaboration with the YBGC Center and the Field Museum of Natural History, spent the next two years developing their proposal. 

The team officially qualified for the competition after submitting their plan to XPRIZE in May of 2021, where they detailed the feasibility of their drone-based data collection solution. 

The next big milestone for the team came in the summer of 2022 when it was chosen as a semifinalist for the competition.

“For the following year, our team was hard at work testing and tweaking our solution – initially in our cold Connecticut backyards, and finally in real rainforest locations,” Jetz wrote. 

The team then traveled to Singapore to compete in the semifinals alongside fourteen other teams at the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, the first formal field test of their solution.

For Jetz, Rudic and the rest of the team, this competition stage was a success. However, the team also realized that they needed to incorporate environmental DNA — collected from environmental samples like soil, air or water — into their data collection alongside audiovisual information.

“We quickly got in contact with collaborators at Rutgers University, the Federal University of Amazonas and others to build a robust eDNA component to our sampling plan,” Jetz. 

With global accessibility a top priority for the MOLRA team, another critical challenge during the competition was designing the drone missions in a cost-effective and easily reproducible way. 

Apart from utilizing free and open-source software, the team had to work around the design limitations of affordable unmanned aerial vehicle platforms. 

“We developed a lot of really clever hardware hacks and reverse-engineered a lot of the control systems for these drones and ended up with a system that could be deployed by someone with minimal additional equipment virtually anywhere in the world with minimal to no direct assistance needed from our small team,” Kevin Winner, modeling lead at the YBGC Center, noted.

XPRIZE announced the MOLRA team as one of six finalists in the fall of 2023. The team members then continued testing their solution in the Amazon rainforest or polishing the software and machine learning algorithms behind their biodiversity assessment technology.

Now, with $2 million in prize money, the MOLRA team hopes to grow its innovation.

The prize money will go toward making the MOLRA solution more accessible and globally deployed, thanks to a Yale Ventures-backed university spinoff that will help grow staff, increase involvement with high-impact projects, and continue refinement of the MOLRA technology. 

The team also aims to build on the YBGC Center’s work with global biodiversity management partners to guide future conservation efforts and decisions and to aid efforts such as the Half-Earth Project. 

“It’s the combination of these scientific products on how species are distributed around the world with the on-the-ground monitoring of MOLRA that will make large scale species-based monitoring more efficient and effective,” Alex Killion, managing director at the YBGC Center, wrote. 

For more information on Map of Life Rapid Assessments, see here.