XPrize - Remote Biodiversity assessments
Rainforests cover less than 10% of the earth's land surface, but they account for more than 50% of the planet's biodiversity. Although rainforests are the most diverse ecosystem, the knowledge of the species living in these iconic environemnts is still very limited. This knowledge gap party exists because of the resricted accessability of dense and vast rainforests.
The XPrize Rainforest competition was designed to shed light into the rainforests of our planets which harbour many unidentified animals, plants and various chemical compounds that can potentially be used as drugs against human diseases. XPrize is a five-year and 10M$ competition to accelerate the innovation of autonomous technologies needed for biodiversity assessment and to enhance our understanding of rainforest ecosystems.
We are part of the external pageETH BiodivX team which became a semi-finalist for the XPrize rainforest competition. Next spring we will visit a rainforest in Singapore with the goal to get as much insights of it as possible without setting foot into the forest. Therefore, we combine several novel and promising technologies to get data out of the rainforest. Among other things, we developped a drone that is capable of taking environmental DNA (eDNA) samples remotely in the rainforest. We developped new methods for sequencing the collected DNA and use state of the art machine learning algorithms to get as much information as possible out of the DNA sequences.
