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Mgr. Adam Kantor, PhD., a representative of the Slovak Academy of Sciences from the Institute of Botany of the Plant Science and Biodiversity Centre SAS (CBRB SAV) is the new winner of the 7th Slovak round of the international competition of students and young scientists Falling Walls Lab, organized in cooperation with the European Researchers' Night. He will present his work at the global final in Berlin.

The Falling Walls Lab competition is intended for students and young scientists of all scientific disciplines who have a breakthrough idea helping to solve one of the global or local pressing problems of today. The contestants aim to present their groundbreaking or innovative solutions to the selected problem. Short reports are presented in English in front of colleagues, the general public and a jury of leading academic and business figures. They are evaluated for (1) innovativeness of the idea, (2) potential impact, or the impact of the idea on society and (3) persuasiveness, or intelligibility of speech. The competition starts with the regional rounds, the winners of which proceed to the global finals in Berlin.

The competition is organized in approximately 60 countries of the world. Each country is represented by one or (in the case of large countries, such as the USA, Germany, and others) several regional centres, the so-called Falling Walls Labs. Slovakia participates in the competition as one regional centre named Falling Walls Lab Slovakia. In the first round, the contestants sent a short summary of their innovative ideas to the Slovak jury, and the jury selected the 17 best, which proceeded to the national round. This took place on September 26, 2024, in the V-klub (National Awareness Center) in Bratislava, and SAS had three representatives among the competitors. Zuzana Bártová and Imelda Octa Tampubolon from the Institute of Geotechnics SAS, and Adam Kantor from CBRB SAV, who became the winner of the competition with his ground-breaking idea of ​​non-native species monitoring.

The spread of invasive non-native species is one of the most pressing global problems in biodiversity conservation. It is estimated that between 1970 and 2017, more than US$ 1.288 trillion was spent worldwide to remediate the damage caused by biological invasions, with the rate of annual costs increasing significantly (Diagne et al. 2021, Nature).

The topic of Adam Kantor's winning paper was an innovative method for detecting new non-native and invasive plants in a certain area using the freely available citizen science tool iNaturalist. With this procedure, Adam Kantor managed to find and confirm the occurrence of 4 new non-native plant species in Slovakia in 2024. He presented the methodological procedure on the example of detecting new non-native vascular plants in Slovakia, however, as he emphasized, it can be applied to any other groups of non-native organisms anywhere in the world.

"We are trying to use data from citizen scientists, who can be anyone without a degree in biology. We evaluate their observations and filter them to reveal newly arrived species. Many of them might be originally cultivated species that can be insignificant from the point of view of nature conservation because they get into nature once and die out, but some of them are invasive and can have impacts on nature and other naturally occurring species," said the winner of the competition, Adam Kantor.

Falling Walls Lab is an interdisciplinary competition organized by the Falling Walls Foundation and funded by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (world finals) and Sartorius (regional rounds). It has been organized since 2009 in honour of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989). It is covered by the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Springer Nature. It has been organized in Slovakia since 2017.

The global finals will take place on November 7 -9, 2024, at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin, and we wish Slovakia's representative, Adam Kantor, good luck!

More information about the national round can be found HERE.

Source: Pavol Mereďa ml., Institute of Botany of the Plant Science and Biodiversity Centre SAS

Edited by: Katarína Gáliková

Photo: Katarína Gáliková