XPRIZE rainforests: providing breakthrough advances for wildlife monitoring

XPRIZE rainforests: providing breakthrough advances for wildlife monitoringIdentifying taxa to species within a reasonable timeframe, especially in the biodiverse tropics, remains difficult.Until recently, species identification relied upon countless hours in the field to record and collect samples, and an even greater amount of time identifying and processing specimens.Importantly, these tasks require the help of taxonomists and other biodiversity experts.Recent technological advances, however, have shifted perspectives on identifying and monitoring wildlife.Environmental DNA enables detection of species presence; artificial intelligence facilitates the processing of vast amounts of image, video and acoustic data, and the identification of taxa with minimum human supervision; and drones have made it possible to access previously inaccessible locations.Nevertheless, there have been few attempts to combine these technologies to record and monitor biological diversity in an automated manner.The XPRIZE Rainforest Competition was a -year competition that started in , initially with teams from over countries, with the aim of advancing measurement and monitoring methods for biodiversity, and thus helping to achieve the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework by .According to the rules of the competition, the teams needed to remotely sample a ha plot of tropical forest within h, without entering the plot, and deliver a final report within the subsequent h.The Limelight Rainforest team, of which we are part, won the competition on November , identifying c. species.Limelight Rainforest won the competition with a creative combination of emerging technologies that promises to advance the monitoring of biodiversity.Although the process