Florida Museum curator helps team score 1st-place and $5 million in international biodiversity competition
Robert Guralnick, Ph.D., curator of bioinformatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is a member of an international team that won first place in the five-year XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The winners were announced Friday, Nov. 15 at a summit held in Rio de Janeiro. More than $7 million was awarded to the top-ranked teams, with $5 million going to the first-place winner.
XPRIZE is a non-profit, solutions-driven organization that has hosted large-scale competitions to solve humanity’s greatest challenges since it was established in 1994. The XPRIZE Rainforest competition kicked off in 2019, hosting 300 teams across 70 countries. The collective goal of each participant was the acceleration of technological innovation to improve the speed and precision of biodiversity surveys in support of global conservation efforts.
In the final stage of the competition, six finalist teams had 24 hours to deploy their technologies, remotely survey a 100-hectare test plot of tropical rainforest without physically entering the test area, and produce a biodiversity analysis report within 48 hours following the deployment. To win the competition’s grand prize, teams were also tasked with demonstrating scalability to effectively disrupt the often lengthy, laborious and resource-intensive process of data collection and analysis.
“It was such a massive collaborative effort,” Guralnick said. “I have never been involved in such a high-pressure situation, where one team does so much work to produce high-quality data, analytics and insights.”