Ecology grad student awarded $100K XPRIZE in Carbon Removal Competition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa – An international team led by Edward Amoah, a graduate student in Penn State’s intercollegiate ecology graduate program, has been named among 23 winners globally of the 2021 XPRIZE Carbon Removal Student Competition. 

The prize comes with a $100,000 award funded by billionaire Elon Musk. Amoah’s team entered the competition’s Measurement, Reporting, and Verification Technologies section, as a project which, as written in the category, “may not directly remove CO2, but will enable carbon removal.”

Amoah’s group is working to train artifical intelligence (AI) to measure forest cover for more accurate monitoring of carbon credits, where landowners are paid to plant or preserve trees to filter carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their wood. The global market for carbon credits is enormous — $272 billion in 2020 — and growing.

Amoah works in the lab of David Hughes, Huck Chair in Global Food Security and professor of entomology and biology, and he is a member of the Hughes-led PlantVillage team, which plans to integrate his project into their award-winning suite of initiatives. Amoah is funded through a fellowship with the Insect Biodiversity Center.

“We've developed surveillance tools for monitoring pest and diseases, and now we are adopting our same technology to monitor tree growth and carbon capture with trees,” said Amoah. “A lot of the carbon credits that you see today are not monitored. They are people that claim they have grown trees, but they're not verifiable publicly. We want to change that. We want carbon credits to be verifiable and monitored in real time.”

To date, Amoah’s team has already identified more than 60,000 trees with farmers and with organizations working with PlantVillage in Kenya. “We have already proven that this is feasible,” he explained. “We are already developing the technology to be able to monitor these trees, and we have done extensive surveillance work already with pest and diseases.”

This isn’t the first time Amoah has been recognized for his outstanding work using technology to serve the greater good. In 2020, as a computer engineering major, he led to a team of fellow students to win a $10K prize through the Nittany AI Challenge with his Nyansapo app, designed to provide children in Kenya with free access to literacy education through cell phones.

The XPRIZE recognition is also the latest in a growing list of plaudits for PlantVillage, which connects smallholder farmers in non-industrialized countries with the expert knowledge base of Penn State expertise, along with access to cutting-edge technologies delivered via cell phones. Hughes’ team was recently awarded a $39 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and has received international coverage for its part in mitigating the 2020 East African locust crisis, an effort in which Amoah was heavily involved.

After working with PlantVillage as an undergraduate computer engineering student at Penn State, Amoah was unable to get a visa to return to the U.S. from his home country of Ghana when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020. But because he was already on the ground in Africa, he was a vital resource for PlantVillage. Hughes’ team shifted Amoah to Kenya, where he led some of the efforts tracking the locust swarms that were devastating farmers in that country.

“He’s a perfect example of what we want to bring about, which is a cadre of young people being trained,” said Hughes of Amoah. “He's a unique combination of a person who has skills in machine learning and computer science, but is also embracing biological problems, such as invasive pests, and he's able to bring those two together. And of course, he's from Ghana. He’s uniquely capable of understanding the problem.”

Jason Kaye, chair of the Ecology program, said “Edward has an exceptional set of skills. He has significant experience in computer science and artificial intelligence, and now through his master's degree he is adding a deep understanding of ecology.  By combining these he is setting a new standard for what is possible.”

The goal of the PlantVillage carbon reduction effort is to help raise 200 million farmers out of poverty in Africa, as they collectively pull down a billion tons of carbon dioxide every year, not only helping themselves, but helping the global community. The ambitious vision will require the supportive coordination of global economic players in the field of carbon credits.

“The XPRIZE pitch is remarkably simple,” said Hughes. “Philanthropy alone is not going to solve the problems that face hundreds of millions of people facing the climate crisis. We believe at PlantVillage that the markets will be able to help, particularly the carbon markets. And so we're developing this system whereby we can plant and track trees at scale, not only to enable climate change adaptation at the farm level, but provide an alternative source of revenue for these farmers.”

Amoah added, “I'm really excited about this XPRIZE award, because we get to show the world what we are doing and the way forward to being able to address climate change and food security together.”

For more information on the XPRIZE Carbon Removal Student Competition, and to see a full list of the 23 winning teams, visit the website.