Racing to Read the Rainforest's Library Before It Burns
Barro Colorado Island, Panama; expanding to Madre de Dios, Peru · Yves Basset, David Rolnick, Maxim Larrivée
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 story
The person and the place
For seventeen years, Yves Basset has walked the forest of Barro Colorado Island, Panama, hand-collecting 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
Basset's own count shows how much of this world is unnamed. As he put it, "in fact, 60% of the insects collected on the island lack a scientific name." 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 moment they didn't wait
Rather than continuing to rely on collection alone, Larrivée and Rolnick built the AMI camera-and-light-trap system and the open-source Antenna platform to photograph moths at scale and flag whatever the model could not 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.
In an early test of the sensors in Panama's rainforest, the team found three hundred new species within a week. 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.
"Estamos quemando la biblioteca antes de leer los libros"
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