Researchers from Switzerland are using drones to monitor the health of the rainforest

euronews (in English)

The team’s project has reached the finals of the global XPRIZE Rainforest competition which encourages the development of technology to measure and monitor the rainforest ecosystem.

Transcript

00:00 (gentle music)

00:02 - We're all coming together to meet this big challenge

00:23 that XPRIZE has put in front of us

00:25 to survey rainforest rapidly

00:27 and then communicate those insights to the broader community.

00:30 - So we brought here mainly two types of drones.

00:33 The first drone is DJI Matrice 300,

00:37 where we added a custom payload.

00:39 And with this custom payload,

00:40 we are able to collect air to sample airborne DNA.

00:45 And the second payload is a probe

00:49 that we can lower inside the canopy

00:51 in order to collect surface DNA

00:54 by swabbing the vegetation that we encounter

00:57 when the probe moves up and down into the canopy.

01:00 (gentle music)

01:04 So one of the main innovation

01:14 that we brought to the competition

01:15 is the probe that allow us to collect surface DNA.

01:20 So this probe is connected with a winch to a drone

01:24 and we can lower this probe deeply

01:26 inside the canopy.

01:28 And with custom control algorithms,

01:31 we can avoid the probe to get entangled.

01:33 So we can really safely lower the probe and bring it up.

01:36 And with this movement,

01:38 we swap environmental DNA from inside the canopy

01:40 that is not accessible otherwise by other means.

01:44 (gentle music)

01:46 you

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