Technical Expert, Accelerated Restoration Grand

About Conservation X Labs

Our mission is to prevent an impending sixth mass extinction, the first in Earth's history driven by the actions of a single species: ours.

Unlike traditional conservation efforts, Conservation X Labs focuses on leveraging the best technology, the newest innovation, interdisciplinary genius, and the power of the marketplace to boldly confront the biggest problems facing the planet. Though humans have driven this sixth extinction, we know humans have the power to reverse it.

The South America Fire Fund (SAFF) seeks to tackle fire, the leading cause of tropical primary forest loss, in three globally significant ecoregions including the Amazon, Chiquitania, and Pantanal. It is an experiment at the size of the Amazon Basin to prevent the Amazon from tipping.

The Fund unites partners to build and test integrated prevention and response systems, learn quickly, and scale what works. It focuses on the underlying conditions that drive destructive fire and combines community-led stewardship, cutting-edge innovation and technology, and data-driven decision systems.

The Accelerated Restoration Grand Challenge is a three-year prize challenge nested within the SAFF. Its premise is that the bottleneck in post-fire restoration is no longer whether to restore but how to do it at the speed and scale the crisis demands, and that the answers will come from advances the field has not yet put to work  Technical Expert is the restoration-science anchor of the challenge, running across the whole program from design through judging and field-testing, and working hand in hand with the Challenge Manager and the Accelerator Program Manager.

We know the right person may not have full time to give. A fractional or advisory arrangement is fine.

Who you are

• You are an innovator in restoration. You know where restoration science is heading, not just where it has been. You can tell a real advance from a marginal improvement on current practice, and you are current on the methods that could change the cost, speed, or durability of restoration at scale.
• You have deep expertise in ecological restoration or fire-affected landscapes, for example in restoration ecology, seed or soil science, or reforestation.
• You have set technical criteria and judged projects, proposals, or innovations on their merits.
• You have the standing to convene senior experts and chair an advisory group people take seriously.
• You are energized by the CXL mission to end extinction, and you want to spend this part of your career on a hard problem that matters.

How you will support CXL

• Decide what the challenge is actually asking innovators to solve, and set the bar at genuine advances rather than standard practice, choosing revolutionary over evolution, but in a way that can be tested on the ground. That means naming the restoration bottlenecks and the advances that could break them, such as getting enough viable seed of enough species to germinate, improving soil with amendments and microbial inoculants, or smarter planting that uses drones, AI-assisted decisions, and patterned revegetation, and matching them to what the target ecoregions really need.
  
  You would check this thinking against restoration partners and the SAFF strategy leads.
• Set up and run the Challenge’s Technical Advisory Committee, drawing on the Fire Fund’s network of world renown experts in restoration ecology, seed and soil science, fire-affected landscapes, and innovation, and bring them together to review the technical criteria and the field-testing protocols.
• Write the evaluation criteria and rubrics, recruit and brief the outside evaluators and judges, and lead the technical read on both the applications and the field-tested results. Judging looks at four things: whether the technology works, whether it works for the people and communities using it, how it performs environmentally, and whether it can scale and sustain itself.
• Keep technical oversight of the field-testing phase alongside the Accelerator Program Manager, including how results get validated, how ecological monitoring is done, what the field protocols are, and where the cohort needs technical mentoring.
• Help lead the technical and restoration partnerships, contribute to the Handbook and the overall structure, and make sure the design fits the LIFT or LIFTs we land on and connects to the Fire Fund’s other levers in technology, finance, and behavior change.

Required

• Deep expertise in ecological restoration or…