Northern Michigan University biology alumna Niyomi House was part of the Limelight Rainforest team awarded the $5 million grand prize in the XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The winners were announced at the G20 Social Summit Nov. 18 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. XPRIZE is “the world's leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity's grand challenges.” House ran the genetics subteam for Limelight.
The competition started with 300 teams across 70 countries. Six advanced to the final stage, which took place in July 2024 in the Brazilian Amazon. The teams had 24 hours to deploy their technologies, remotely survey a 100-hectare test plot of tropical rainforest without physically entering the area, and produce a biodiversity analysis report within 48 hours.
House earned two degrees from Northern: a bachelor's in (2015year) and a master's in (2017year). She said Limelight is an interdisciplinary team of more than 60 ecologists, robotics engineers, Indigenous scientists and taxonomists from many institutions. Their winning solution involved different components: genetics, bioacoustics, AI models, insect traps and tree identification. House ran genetics with assistance from students from Michigan State University, Colorado Mesa University and Virginia Tech.
“We collected mainly environmental samples—water, air, surface DNA from the rainforest canopy—within the first 24 hours,” said House, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow sponsored by Virginia Tech and the University of Florida, where she earned her doctorate. “We collaborated with the drone group, Outreach Robotics. we had so many meetings throughout many months to figure out our sampling devices and how to efficiently capture DNA in the Amazon. The drone group deployed all sampling devices in the first 24 hours, brought back all the samples to us, and we did everything from extracting DNA to sequencing to analyzing and writing the report for submission.”
According to a press release, Limelight's multi-taxa monitoring sensors “demonstrate remarkable performance to advance biodiversity monitoring.” They are designed to be deployed via drone to the rainforest canopy, the most under-researched layer of the rainforest, to collect bioacoustic data, images of insects and insect specimens that are attracted to the technology's novel light trap. The platform provides a real-time feed of data to its base technology, which rapidly identifies species using machine learning.
The technology significantly condenses the amount of time needed to capture DNA from the environment and specimens for identification using a purpose-developed, field-based, portable molecular lab kit. During finals testing, Limelight identified more than 250 different species and 700 unique taxa across both the animal and plant kingdoms from observations recorded during their 24-hour deployment—the highest amount of biodiversity observed by finalist teams.
“At the semifinals in Singapore last year, the challenge was just to assess how well we can actually sample, sequence and give them a list of species that we found with no interpretation,” House added. “They just wanted to know how well our solutions work together. And for finals, it was different. A species list wasn't the end goal. We were judged by how much insight we can provide on the rainforest with just 24-hour sampling. It involved interpreting what it means to have the invasive species, or the endangered species, or human communities nearby. The goal is to inform the health of the forest to promote conservation.”
House had accumulated college credits over two years in her home country of Sri Lanka when she began exploring U.S. schools. She applied to a few, but decided to transfer to Northern.
“That was the first university I heard back from, and I received a good scholarship, which helped in my decision,” she said. “But the Biology Department and people were so great that I decided to stay longer and complete my master's degree. The professors gave me the foundation for everything I know right now. Dr. Kurt Galbreath was my adviser and I still talk to him a lot. I also loved the international programs office. They were very helpful and were really like family.”
House has been on the academic path for several years, but she said the XPRIZE competition was transformative in that it made her realize the importance of taking lab work into the field to develop solutions to real-world problems.
“It kind of changed my trajectory to step away from academia and go to the industry side to see how I can better take the knowledge and skills I've gained and apply it in meaningful ways. It was amazing to work and talk with people on the ground toward a common goal of preserving the Amazon rainforest and its biodiversity, and to help people who live near it protect their home. I just want to give credit to everybody on my DNA team, which did an amazing job. We accomplished a lot.”
The press release announcing the grand-prize winner stated that roughly 64% of the world's tropical rainforest has been destroyed or degraded, and continues to be destroyed at a rapid rate, despite being home to half of all living animal and plant species on the planet. It also reported about 20% of the Amazon has already been lost, "and studies show that at 20-25% degradation, the Amazon ecosystem will face a tipping point and irreversibly shift global climate." Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots and essential in climate regulation, but consistently face deforestation for agricultural expansion, logging, mining and other industrial projects.
“The future of life on Earth, including that of our own species, will depend on humanity's collective ability to urgently understand the true value of nature on our planet and coexist with it. The technologies designed and field tested through XPRIZE Rainforest are capable of rapidly and remotely assessing the biodiversity and ecological insights of tropical rainforests at scale,” said Peter Houlihan, executive vice president, Biodiversity and Conservation, XPRIZE. “In partnership with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, these tools are ideally suited for implementation to monitor, manage and protect tropical rainforests globally, and to accelerate the achievement of the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework by 2030.”
View a final competition video from House's winning team here. Learn more about the XPRIZE Rainforest Competition here.
