The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hs set up a sort of mini-X-Prize for ideas to help bats threatened by white-nose syndrome, the fungus that has wiped out entire populations of bats throughout the country.
What’s interesting about this challenge, which offers up to $20,000 per chosen team, is that it’s not the usual request-for-proposals process that governments follow. It’s much more of a blue-sky, whiteboarding kind of approach:
This Challenge does not require a final prototype, proposal or budget for immediate implementation, nor seek to duplicate strategies currently in development. New ideas that offer significant improvements in scalability, efficacy, or feasibility of existing methods or new management strategies to combat the fungus are welcome.
You’ve got to submit your idea by the end of the month (Dec. 31). This Medium article tells more.
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