This New Jersey professor helped count a quarter of a million beetles for a $5 million prize

When the XPRIZE Foundation, which incentivizes technological breakthroughs, asked scientists to map the biodiversity of rainforests, 300 teams signed up. The stakes were high as the top group in the six-year competition would win $5 million.

Six teams gathered for 24 hours in July for the finalists challenge to see who could count the most species in one square kilometer of Amazon rainforest. Without ever setting foot in it.

Two days later, all the images, DNA strands and audio recordings were cataloged.

The winners were last announced in mid-November at the G20 social summit in Rio de Janeiro. The winning team included a professor from New Jersey who specializes in fish that emit weak electrical charges.

And what’s more important – at least in the Amazon – is that he’s a master at soldering.

Eric Fortune, 57, a professor of neuroscience at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was the team’s lead systems engineer. He developed sensors and control networks for the team’s ten drones, which landed in the rainforest canopy to collect data. He also developed an early version of the team’s camera device, which uses a white screen to attract insects from the forest canopy. They found 250,000.

“The real reward is that this work can have a lasting impact on these vital ecosystems and the communities that depend on them,” Fortune said. “That’s what attracted us to this competition in the first place.”

The Limelight Rainforest team, named for the glowing insect traps, was founded by Thomas Walla, a biology professor at Colorado Mesa University.

Walla said Fortune was a key player in all of the team’s innovations, building prototypes for collecting the sounds of the rainforest and capturing insects for photography.

“Eric is a brilliant outside-the-box thinker who combines his creative work in neuroscience with his passion for the Earth’s wildest and most diverse ecosystems,” said Walla. “Our team would not have existed without Eric Fortune’s boundless optimism and willingness to engage with technology to solve environmental problems…His work is truly a miracle.”

The team of more than 50 experts planned to treat the habitat like a crime scene and collect 45 liters of water by lowering pipes from the drones to take river water samples. When nearby mammals, birds or insects ate tree leaves or left droppings, their DNA found its way into the water.

The team also recorded bird songs and bat signals and used artificial intelligence to recognize tree species from images of the canopy.

For the finale, Limelight scientists traveled to Manaus, Brazil, and then by boat up the Rio Negro to a hut. They sent out ten drones, five with camera traps, five with insect traps

“And from then on everything just clicked,” Fortune said.

More specifically, when things broke, he helped fix them.

“I was MacGyver,” he said, as he was responsible for the team’s electricity, its Ethernet and other networks, and “everything no one else wanted to do.”

During the competition, he used his bag of thousands of spare parts to connect USB plugs to cables and keep the machines running smoothly.

“We were prepared for many different types of failures and handled any small failures that occurred,” he said.

The team had another advantage: close relationships with the Quichua and Waorani indigenous groups, who had reviewed thousands of sounds and images of rainforest species, confirming the team’s AI identifications.

“Our Indigenous team members are the true masters of this knowledge,” said Fortune. “We were confident that our AI was well-trained because the world’s best experts validated the data we fed into the AI.”

The team collected 27 million strands of DNA as evidence of who had passed by and found more than 250 species. In addition, 23,000 individual trees were identified.

Fortune, whose academic work has titles like “Duet song in wrens” and “Feedback control in weakly electric fish,” took a detour to the project.

He had visited Ecuador in high school, and when a fellow Johns Hopkins University professor was called to serve in the Air National Guard after the Sept. 11 attacks, Fortune jumped in his place and led a field research trip to the South American country.

There he spent half of his career studying birds and joined NJIT’s growing biology department in 2013.

A scientist in Ecuador recommended Fortune for the XPRIZE team because he spent time on the edge of a volcano in a cloud forest and gained expertise in technical equipment in rainforest habitats.

The prize money is divided among the team; Fortune is grateful that the winnings will cover his travel expenses as he paid his living expenses for the competition.

He’s already helping develop some of the team’s technologies for broader use by nonprofits, indigenous communities and other groups working to protect the rainforest.

He even discusses using the team’s biodiversity measurement tools to improve barren areas in the United States, such as the parking lots of large retail stores.

“I want to provide a mechanism to incentivize these spaces to be less threatened by biodiversity,” he said, adding that his building overlooks an experiment that allowed natural plants to grow in some empty planters. They are crowded now.

A system where companies could receive credit for increasing biodiversity on their properties could work elegantly, he said.

Looking back, he was lucky to be part of the “hilarious, entertaining, thought-provoking” competition.

“I’ve never had more fun in my life,” he said. “Being part of this crazy adventure for three years has been a tremendous learning experience with so many twists and turns.”