| Brazilian Team | Piracicaba | Brazil | | fealq.org.br |
The Brazilian Team has been built as a collaborative and multidisciplinary group of scientific research, including bioinformaticians, ecologists, robotic engineers and taxonomists, devoting synergic efforts to improve our knowledge on plant and animal diversity from tropical rainforests worldwide, using modern techniques such as spectrography, DNA barcoding and artificial intelligence. This approach has been applied during the XPrize Rainforest.
Considering that destruction of tropical rainforests is expanding faster than human ability to study them, our aim focuses on promoting innovative technologies for the rapid, accurate and low-cost characterization of biodiversity, especially from remote areas.
Our main innovations rely on the use of existing tools (drones, bioacoustic devices, portable sequencers) and knowledge in an integrated manner, aiming to develop technologies and a protocol for rapid and replicable study of biodiversity, which are easily handled by non-specialized professionals, but, at the same time, based on scientific methodology and comparable among different environments. |
| ETH BiodivX | Zurich | Switzerland | | |
ETH BiodivX formed out of a merge of team GainForest and team BiodivExplorer.
Our experiences span cultural, artistic, scientific, and social science backgrounds- from inventing ways to sequence DNA from air to influencing and negotiating multilateral conservation agreements to working on the frontlines of human health connections and biodiversity. We are team ETH BiodivX and we enter this competition as if it were no different than our daily work, because in fact, we have all dedicated our careers to solving the technical and environmental challenges of our time. |
| Map of Life Rapid Assessments | New Haven | United States | | mol.org/rapidassesments |
Map of Life Rapid Assessments
We are an international team with background in biodiversity science, biodiversity monitoring, survey technologies, machine learning, and taxonomic identification. Our X-Prize solution leverages careful groundwork for quantitatively linking up geographic scales of observation with human-in-the-loop machine learning to deliver comprehensive local biodiversity information and support conservation insights. Our general framework offers strong scalability and flexible extension to new survey hardware and links in identification experts in innovative and effective ways. |
| PROVIDENCE PLUS | Barcelona | Spain | | providenceplus.upc.edu |
| The Providence+ solution augments our existing technology Providence, a first-in-class unique design. Providence is a sensory box that has been designed by the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at Technical University of Catalonia – Barcelona Tech (UPC), team leader, and that has been widely deployed in different environments to capture biodiversity data, specifically covering Marimauá reserve in collaboration with the Insituto Mamiraua in Brazil, member of Providence+ team. In this competition we extend the functionalities of Providence, which nowadays mainly bases its success on the recording and processing of bioacoustics information, by improving its image processing and allowing remote deployment using aerial vehicles. All the improved image processing capabilities are being developed by MIT and UPC, whereas aerial vehicles technology is being provided by TUDelft and UPC and CSIC. There will be two types of aerial vehicles: (i) for surveillance and providing communications relays; and (ii) for carrying and deploying the sensory boxes. Communications systems are being designed at UPC. Apart from ecosystem diversity indices and metrics, the Visualization group at UPC is working to compute the spatio-temporal co- occurrence of species, thereby highlighting relational aspects among and across them, which will be represented as a dynamic graph. Providence+ includes e-DNA sampling in its technological approach, thus implicating integrating historical data on species composition with the observed current biodiversity status, mostly provided by the real-time analysis of soundscapes and flora image classification. |
| Team Waponi! | Grand Junction | United States | | |
Team Waponi is a small group that is a subset of a group of over 50 professionals that have worked together for several decades, discovering new species of insects and plants in the Amazon and working with indigenous groups. Nearly all our members have spent substantial time in the tropics monitoring species diversity and together we have produced hundreds of research papers. Our team has been exploring the frontier of autonomous sampling in a diversity of fields and our most current solution is focused on collecting the richest and most informative types of data which include insects and bioacoustics from rainforest ecosystems.
Our solution is a custom designed modular sampling device called the Limelight that samples rainforest diversity using acoustic and photographic data collection. Limelight units will be delivered autonomously to the rainforest canopy where they will lower into the forest layers for sampling. The devices will collect digital images of insects attracted through a diversity of method and acoustic data from specialized microphones. This data will be relayed by a mesh system for real time analysis and species identification by machine learning algorithms. |
| Welcome to the Jungle | Chicago | United States | | |
| Welcome to the Jungle is using their expertise in robotics and conservation to provide unique solutions to the XPrize Rainforest Challenge. |
