The Brazilian Team qualified as a finalist in the international competition called Xprize Rainforest, becoming the only team from Latin America to achieve the feat. The team includes, in addition to several other researchers, biologist Simone Dena and professor Luís Felipe Toledo, both from the Biology Institute (IB) at Unicamp. Professor Vinícius Castro Souza, from the Luiz de Queiroz Higher School of Agriculture (Esalq) at the University of São Paulo (USP), is the general coordinator of the Brazilian Team, made up, in total, of almost 60 researchers from different areas, most of them of Brazil, mainly affiliated with public universities. There is also the participation of scientists from other countries, such as Colombia, France, Spain and Germany.
The Xprize Rainforest aims to improve understanding of tropical forest ecosystems through autonomous technologies used to assess biodiversity, using rapid data integration with the aim of providing a new way of understanding the forest. Xprize is an international organization that promotes competitions typically focused on the development of innovative technologies.
Initially, more than 800 teams signed up for the competition, which lasts five years and is in its fourth year. Initially, there was a qualifying phase and, subsequently, the semi-finals, which featured 13 teams testing their methodologies on the field, between May and June this year, in Singapore. At this stage of the competition, six teams advanced to the finals, which will take place in the middle of next year in a country to be defined.
The winning team's mission will be to draw the largest possible panel on biodiversity in a given section of a tropical forest, within 24 hours, and use this data to produce, after 48 hours, the largest possible number of new insights, revealing the potential of biodiversity and the standing forest. The three winning teams will receive cash prizes – for first place, US$5 million, for second, US$2 million and for third, US$500. The Brazilian Team decided that any and all awards received will be fully used in research and conservation measures for forest biodiversity, especially in the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon.
Species that make sounds
Within the team there are several groups dedicated to researching biodiversity in an integrative way. The Bioacoustics Group at IB at Unicamp, which is coordinated by Dena and Toledo, is dedicated to identifying and studying animals based on their emission of sounds. To achieve this, the researchers are creating several methodologies, always in partnership with other groups on the team, which include the use of ground robots and platforms positioned by drones within the forest (platforms developed by the robotics group at USP in São Carlos ) to autonomous or semi-autonomous analyzes of detection and identification of species through methodologies of machine learning algorithm and artificial intelligence.
The destruction of tropical rainforests is progressing faster than human capacity to study them. Therefore, it is necessary to dedicate synergistic efforts to improve our knowledge about the plant and animal diversity of these forests around the world, using modern techniques such as spectrography, environmental DNA, bioacoustics and remote sensing. The technologies developed and implemented by the Brazilian Team are being carefully designed in this context for a rapid and accurate assessment of biodiversity, especially in remote or inaccessible geographic areas.
