The Challenge

Cocoa farming has driven massive deforestation in West Africa: Cote d’Ivoire, the world’s leading exporter, has seen a loss of 80% of its forests since its independence in 1960. While cocoa is traditionally grown in monoculture, it can thrive under the shade of tall trees. To restore some of the lost tree cover, the planting of shade trees is a high priority for the country as well as the private sector, to reverse the impacts of deforestation and improve carbon sequestration by African tropical forests.

In this challenge, your objective is to predict biomass in shaded regions in Cote d’Ivoire based on GEDI, Sentinel-2 and ground truth biomass data. Remote monitoring of the increase of biomass will help measure the impact of reforestation efforts in Cote d’Ivoire as well as detect degradation of forests due to cocoa, without requiring expensive and labor-intensive biomass estimates on the ground.

What is the Purpose of this challenge?

The purpose of this challenge is to encourage YEESI Lab members to prepare for machine learning hackathons that will be conducted by the YEESI Lab later this year. You may use our GPU node: http://yeesi.sua.ac.tz/ 

Awards

The best model is $100 (TShs 250,000). The next two runners' up will take home $50 (TShs 120,000) each. The top ten will go home with the active participation certificate.

You are warmly welcome.