The task at hand was nothing short of grueling. In the depths of the Amazon Rainforest earlier this year, it was a mad scramble as six teams deployed cutting-edge technology to survey a 100-hectare (250-acre) plot of the forest within 24 hours. The only caveat: they wouldn’t be allowed to set foot inside the forest. So they flew drones in, deployed robots, and unleashed a flurry of artificial intelligence models. In the end, the team that identified the highest amount of biodiversity in the plot — 250 different species and 700 unique taxa — walked away with the first prize in, what one of the participants dubbed, the “Biodiversity Olympics.” Limelight Rainforest, a multidisciplinary team of ecologists, robotics engineers and Indigenous scientists brought together by a group at Colorado Mesa University in the U.S., was awarded $5 million in the five-year-long XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The team’s win brings to a close the $10 million competition that aimed to identify solutions that could automate the monitoring and protection of rainforests around the world. Three other teams were also recognized and awarded prize money for the solutions they showcased at the final round of testing in Manaus in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Limelight Rainforest, a team of ecologists, robotics engineers and Indigenous scientists, has won first place in the $10 million XPRIZE Rainforest competition. Image courtesy of XPRIZE Foundation. XPRIZE Rainforest was organized by California-based nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation. The competition was launched in 2019, and the 300 teams that initially joined…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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