XPRIZE Rainforest and IUFRO Partner up for a Better Understanding of Rainforests

Photo praesentator on Pixabay

While all forest types are critically important for biodiversity conservation, it is essential to remember that the world's shrinking rainforests, which cover less than 2% of our planet's total surface area, are home to about 50% of all known plant and animal species.

Launched in 2019, the $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest is a five-year global competition challenging innovators to develop new technologies to rapidly and comprehensively survey rainforest biodiversity and use those data to improve shared understandings of this ecosystem. To support and promote the competition, XPRIZE Rainforest has now entered into a partnership agreement with IUFRO, the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, which unites more than 15,000 scientists in around 650 Member Organizations in over 125 countries.

The competition calls on innovators to develop novel technologies for identifying and cataloging rainforest biodiversity and to deliver insights from integrating multiple sources of data to show the value of the biodiversity contained within standing tropical rainforests globally. Co-designing and co-creating solutions with Indigenous Peoples and local communities as key stakeholders is part of the prize framework. Based on the partners' knowledge, experience, as well as human and technical resources in the field of innovation, the partnership aims to foster global interdisciplinary scientific collaboration, including forest science, to find solutions to pressing global challenges.

IUFRO experts are invited to join teams in the competition. Additionally, they will be invited to support XPRIZE Rainforest with informational sessions, workshops, trainings, and/or other initiatives to support teams that participate in the competition, especially if they have gaps in expertise that IUFRO scientists could fill. The partners will also promote the development and deployment of innovative technological solutions to key stakeholders during and after the competition to make an impact that supports the health of this vital ecosystem and sustainable societal interactions with rainforests world-wide.

Beyond this, IUFRO and XPRIZE will explore additional opportunities to collaborate on future prize competitions related to forests, conservation, and climate change.

"XPRIZE is committed to the future of life on our planet and establishing strategic partnerships to ensure an equitable and sustainable future for humanity," said Peter Houlihan, VP Biodiversity & Conservation XPRIZE. "To achieve this, we are excited to work with IUFRO on XPRIZE Rainforest, a five-year, ten-million-dollar global competition incentivizing interdisciplinary teams from all over the world to increase and expedite shared understandings of tropical rainforests worldwide, to more effectively monitor, manage, and conserve the world's most biodiverse forests."

"IUFRO's global network for forest research collaboration accelerates the development and sharing of multi-disciplinary forest-related knowledge," said IUFRO President John Parrotta. "Our partnership with XPRIZE creates an important and exciting opportunity to further share this knowledge and develop innovative tools to conserve tropical rainforests and the multiple benefits that they provide to all those who value and depend on them."


For further information about XPRIZE Rainforest, please visit:
XPRIZE Rainforest | XPRIZE Foundation

IUFRO members who want to learn more about the partnership benefits, please visit our Partnership webpages: IUFRO: XPrize / IUFRO's Partners / Discover IUFRO

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IUFRO Contact:
Gerda Wolfrum, Communications, wolfrum@iufro.org

XPRIZE Contact:
Arnaud Cahen, Vice President Program Activation, Arnaud.Cahen@xprize.org


XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement of over 1M people and rising, delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world's grandest challenges in exploration, environment and human equity. Active competitions include the $100 Million XPRIZE Carbon Removal with Elon Musk, $15 Million XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion, $10 Million XPRIZE Rainforest, $10 Million ANA Avatar XPRIZE, $5 Million XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling and $1 Million Digital Learning Challenge. Donate, sign up or join a team at xprize.org.

The International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) is a world-wide organization devoted to forest research and related sciences. Its members are research institutions, universities, and individual scientists as well as decision-making authorities and other stakeholders with a focus on forests and trees. https://www.iufro.org