Tuesday, November 19, 2019

XPRIZE Launches New $10M Prize, The Rainforest XPRIZE

Los Angeles-based XPRIZE announced a brand new competition, the $10M Rainforest XPRIZE. According to the organization, the new competition will run for four years and calls on innovators to create technology capable of identifying and cataloging rainforest biodiversity and develop insights that may lead to a new bioeconomy through standing forests. XPRIZE says that current ways of measuring biodiversity--including in situ human-led studies, remote sensing by satellites or radar, or sophisticated spectroscopy--cannot operate to scale and gather the data necessary to understand the full ecosystem wealth of rainforests in sustainable ways. The organization suggested that using such technologies as robotics, remote sensing, data analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning might be useful in this area. The deadline for teams to register for the effort is June 30th.