Major drone deployment for XPRIZE Rainforest
June 2023
The XPRIZE Rainforest Challenge is a US$10 million 5-year competition to measure biodiversity and produce meaningful insights to benefit rainforest ecosystems and local communities.
The semifinals testing phase was completed in Singapore in June 2023, where teams each had 24 hours to test their technologies in defined plots within the forest. Successful teams demonstrated the ability to survey the forest over a wide area, capturing images, bioacoustics, DNA and physical samples and identifying them within a 48-hour period of data analysis to provide a species richness assessment.
Unsurprisingly, drones were a major aspect of the solutions deployed by the teams. More than 90 flights involving 19 drone types were flown at the Windsor Park vicinity during the competition.
Six teams from Brazil, Spain, Switzerland and USA will advance to the finals stage of competition to be held in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, in the state of Amazonas, in mid-2024.
(Image by Hans from Pixabay)
