 Humans now dominate Earth's ecosystems and the atmosphere, and through our actions, we've imperiled more species on this Earth than at any time since a meteor took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We call our version of this the sixth extinction. The irony is that Earth's web of life, what people like me call biodiversity, literally underpins and generates our own life support system. So this extinction process that we're in now could be our own disappearing act. How do we mitigate the extinction process, and can new technologies help us to better manage Earth to save more species? I've been into nature since childhood, but my first big biodiversity inspiration in this area came about in 1992 when I was working for a conservation NGO in Hawaii. I was tasked with finding rare and endangered species in remote places. This proved to be extremely difficult due to access. Then Richard Leakey wrote the first book called The Sixth Extinction, and put this massive biodiversity problem into perspective for me. Now, fast forward 20 years, and I have a plan that could revolutionize how we use our very limited conservation funds, and they are very limited globally, to manage Earth forward for more species. I call it the life mission, and it's based on Earth mapping technology that I've developed and deployed from high-flying aircraft. Back in 95, I was told we weren't going to map biodiversity. We could stick to standard NASA-type satellites, map deforestation, and so forth. I wanted to know not just where a forest is, but what a forest contains. If we can know that, then we can make what are going to be hard decisions on what to save. About 2005, on the pathway to being able to do this kind of work, I made a big discovery that plants actually have chemical signatures like fingerprints, and that we could use these chemical fingerprints to tell different species apart. I called the approach Spectronomics because it uses a spectrum of chemical properties in plants to tell them apart, just like genomics does for humans with DNA. Then I needed a way to fly over ecosystems and measure these chemical signatures, so I invented the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, which we flew in this rickety airplane over Hawaii. But over the past decade, we've learned how to actually map species from their chemical fingerprints, and you're seeing a video of that right now, where each color is a different species as we fly over the Amazon basin. We also have combined those types of mapping capabilities with ground-based data on how the animals are using the habitat, so that we can put a fuller understanding of biodiversity together for any given landscape. And in 2011, I launched what we call the new superspectrometer on board a much larger aircraft to do much larger projects. A good example is a 76 million hectare region of the Peruvian, Andes, and Amazon region, which shown here, we map the different types of forests unknown to science prior to our mapping. And then we overlaid government information about what's being protected, and then what's being missed. And through that process, we learned as a scientific enterprise how to engage governments and NGOs about biodiversity and about what they weren't really thinking about in terms of protections. We've developed a way of issuing report cards from protected area to protected area so that governments and other stakeholders can understand how well they're doing. This is all from aircraft. Last year, I used my third generation aircraft and imaging system to map northern Borneo, and this was a special case because the Malaysian government had asked us to come into their country to map the biodiversity for the sole purpose of deciding where to put a new protected area. And it was that invitation that made me realize we have something bigger to offer beyond our own science. So my idea today is straightforward, but it's not simple. I want to launch into Earth orbit a fourth generation instrument that will map global biodiversity in unprecedented detail. I think by doing so, we can achieve two conservation innovations that just a few years ago we thought were impossible. The first one is we can begin to rethink and rezone where we're putting our effort to change the cost-benefit ratio of global conservation by deciding where the most critical habitats are to protect now going into a relatively uncertain future. The second thing we can do by monitoring over time, we can start to assess the performance of current conservation commitments and initiatives. Two things come from that. One is that by monitoring the performance, the people on the ground actually doing the conservation work are going to increase their efficiency because they know that their performance is being assessed and they would be part and parcel to that process. Secondly, over time we're going to get a much better understanding of what works and what doesn't work and so we can reallocate our funds, our efforts based on efficacy. Again, I call this the life mission. It's a mission that we've already developed quite far along now. It includes hardware design, satellite design, data analytics and conservation ties. We know we have what it takes to go to Earth orbit for this. After 20 years of doing what I do, I strongly believe that this mission is needed to save biodiversity and perhaps ourselves. Thank you.