Forest researcher wins major environmental award
Zuzana Burivalova received the 2026 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award for her work listening to forests.
A tropical forest ecologist uses remote audio recorders to monitor mammals, birds, and insects across the globe. She places these devices in forests including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Peru, Madagascar, and Ecuador to track biodiversity changes.
Burivalova serves as an academic staff member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and leads the Sound Forest Lab. Her team collects sound data to understand what life sounds like inside protected areas around the world.
She has collaborated with Mongabay on a platform that examines how well various conservation strategies actually work in practice. This partnership helps share knowledge about effective methods for protecting natural environments from further degradation.
Burivalova plans to use prize money to expand her Soundscape Baselines Project for more scientists. She hopes to build a portfolio showing exactly how sound data can guide future conservation efforts globally today. The finalists also received smaller sums for their own ecological research initiatives.