Hannes Kath, Thiago S. Gouvêa and Daniel Sonntag were awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th BUIS Days 2025 - the VLBA Symposium in Oldenburg from 5 to 6 June 2025 - for their contribution "A Look Under the Hood of the Xprize Rainforest Competition System" was honoured.

The conference, which took place at ecos work spaces and focussed on the use of operational environmental information systems in smart and sustainable infrastructures, brought together over 60 participants and 32 accepted papers. Supported by the Centre for Digital Innovation Lower Saxony (ZDIN) and the Oldenburgisch-Ostfriesischer Wasserverband (OOWV), the event honoured outstanding work in three Best Award categories.

The winning paper highlights the Xprize Rainforest competition system and presents innovative tools such as YAPAT for annotating extensive bioacoustic data sets. With the help of methods such as active learning, transfer learning and audio separation, the researchers contribute to the efficient identification of species and the monitoring of biodiversity.