Earth Genome worked with Amazon Conservation and Pulitzer Center to build Amazon Mining Watch.[/caption]
Early applications suggest a wide range of uses. Investigations have mapped illegal gold mining in the Amazon, quarry operations in the Balkans, watersheds in California’s farming heartland, and methane emissions from cattle. Others have used the tool to catalogue industrial livestock facilities or track changes in land use across regions.
Much of the underlying imagery comes from public satellites with moderate resolution and update frequency, making the system less suited to real-time monitoring. Interpretation still depends on user judgment, and false positives remain a risk. The availability of such tools also raises questions about oversight and misuse, even if current data constraints reduce the likelihood of surveillance at a granular level.
Its main impact, for now, is that access extends beyond specialists. By lowering the technical threshold, it extends capabilities once confined to governments and specialists to a wider set of actors: journalists, researchers, advocacy groups, and local communities. Whether it improves environmental outcomes will depend on who uses it, and to what ends.
Disclosure: Mongabay has a partnership with Earth Genome. Earth Genome did not have editorial influence over this piece. 
Perched high above the forest floor, the tropical canopy is a reservoir of biodiversity that has long resisted scrutiny. Its inaccessibility has left many of its inhabitants — orchids, epiphytes, ants, monkeys, frogs — poorly studied and poorly protected. But a new study offers a workaround: let the rain do the climbing.
Scientists led by Lucie Zinger at the France-based Center for Biodiversity and Environmental Research (CBRE) have shown that water dripping from the canopy carries traces of DNA, or environmental DNA (eDNA), from the organisms above. By capturing and analyzing this “rainwash” in low-tech collectors, they identified hundreds of species across plants, insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals.
The plants and animals detected in rainwash of an old-growth forest compared to a plantation plot.
The study, conducted in French Guiana, compared samples from a mature Amazonian forest and a nearby tree plantation. The results were striking. Diversity was markedly higher in the undisturbed forest, where passive collectors accumulated eDNA over a 10-day period. Crucially, the rainwash signal was both local and persistent. Even after heavy rain, biodiversity signatures remained spatially distinct at the scale of tens of meters and stable for up to 40 days.
Unlike airborne or stream-based eDNA, which can drift and muddle geographic origin, rainwash captures a sharp snapshot of the immediate canopy. It can also be deployed at scale with minimal cost. The researchers propose that this method could become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring in tropical forests — habitats that are increasingly threatened and chronically undersurveyed.
That’s not to say it’s a panacea. Detection remains limited to species that shed detectable DNA, and to wet seasons when rainfall is sufficient. But in a field stymied by logistical and financial constraints, the ability to “listen” to the canopy through its own runoff is a conceptual advance. In the future, the hum of the rainforest may be traced not through what can be seen and heard, but through what the rain leaves behind.
Banner image of a strawberry poison dart frog, by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Founder's Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
In the mid-1990s, the kākāpō seemed destined for extinction. Only 51 individuals of the flightless, nocturnal parrot remained, all of them descended from a shrinking gene pool and spread across remote corners of New Zealand. A victim of its own evolutionary success, the kākāpō had once flourished in a predator-free island ecosystem. But its defenses—freezing when threatened, nesting on the ground, and producing a strong scent—proved fatal once humans introduced cats, rats, and stoats. Against these odds, the kākāpō recovery has become one of conservation’s most carefully managed comebacks. The entire population is now named, monitored, and fitted with smart transmitters. Breeding, which occurs only during occasional mast years when native trees fruit heavily, is bolstered by artificial insemination and precision feeding. Drones ferry sperm across island sanctuaries in minutes, shortening a journey that once took hours on foot. Data loggers track every movement, weight change, and mating. The results are cautiously encouraging. As of 2024, the known population stands at 244 individuals. All reside on predator-free islands, with a few reintroduced to the New Zealand mainland under close surveillance. Scientists have even sequenced the genome of every adult kākāpō, using genetic data to manage breeding pairs and reduce the risks of inbreeding. Success remains fragile. The species is still critically endangered, and low genetic diversity continues to affect fertility. Yet the recovery offers valuable lessons for other conservation efforts. The kākāpō’s survival is a testament to long-term planning, technological innovation, and sheer persistence. What began as a desperate salvage mission has become a case study in high-stakes species management. Lessons from the kākāpō recovery:
