Environment · Breakthrough
Racing to read the rainforest's library before it burns
Yves Basset, David Rolnick, Maxim Larrivée · Barro Colorado Island, Panama; expanding to Madre de Dios, Peru
The forest is the library and every unnamed insect is an unread book. On a Panama island, a 17-year count meets a closing funding window, and a new set of eyes reads faster than time runs out.
The person and the place
For seventeen years, Yves Basset has led the arthropod count on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, cataloguing insects most of the world will never think to name. Maxim Larrivée, who leads the Montreal Insectarium, wanted to find the species no one has ever catalogued, the "dark diversity" hiding in plain sight. He brought in David Rolnick, a researcher at McGill University and the Quebec AI Institute (Mila), to build the eyes that could help him look.
The problem the team cared about
Basset's own count shows how much of this world is unnamed. Mongabay Latam reports that 60 percent of the insects collected on the island have no scientific name, a figure it attributes to Basset. Insects are vanishing at a pace that outstrips anything scientists have measured before, and no team of hands, however patient, can count fast enough to keep up.
The agency moment
Rather than continuing to rely on collection alone, the team put AMI camera-and-light-trap stations into the forest to photograph moths at scale, and Rolnick designed the open-source Antenna platform to read what the traps bring back and flag whatever the model cannot identify for a human expert to examine. The tool did not replace the naming. It widened how much ground two people could cover before the window closed.
What changed
In an early test of the sensors in Panama's rainforest, the team found three hundred new species within a week, Rolnick told AFP in November 2024. On Barro Colorado today, roughly a quarter of the moths photographed are still unknown to science, and the same approach is expanding into Peru's Madre de Dios, where unnamed species can make up more than half of what turns up. Meanwhile, federal funding for the island's monitoring effort has run dry, threatening to shut the program down by the end of 2026 unless new private support arrives.
The move worth copying
Nobody reading this is going to build a rainforest sensor network. The copyable part is smaller: they started counting before they knew what they would find. Know someone counting something nobody else thinks is worth counting? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"Estamos quemando la biblioteca antes de leer los libros." (We are burning the library before we read the books.) — Maxim Larrivée, director, Montreal Insectarium, to Mongabay Latam
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
Sources last verified .
- Mongabay Latam, May 2026 ↗
- AFP wire, via Jacaranda FM, November 2024 ↗
- Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the institution that runs the Barro Colorado program, September 2025 ↗
AI-generated illustration inspired by this story.
