Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa Bonpl.) is a major non-timber forest product in the Amazon, supporting extractivist communities in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru and contribute to forest conservation. Unlike other extractive products, Brazil nut production has not declined under commercial use and is recognized for its socioeconomic and environmental importance. Precision agriculture has been transformed by the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI), which enable monitoring efficiency and yield estimation in several crops, including the Brazil nut. This study assessed the potential of using UAV-based imagery combined with YOLOv8 object detection model to identify and quantify Brazil nut fruits in a native forest fragment in eastern Acre, Brazil. A UAV was used to capture canopy images of 20 trees with varying diameters at breast height. Images were manually annotated and used to train the YOLOv8 with an 80/20 split for training and validation/testing. Model performance was evaluated using precision, recall, F1-score, and mean Average Precision (mAP). The model achieved recall above 90%, with an F1-score of 0.88, despite challenges from canopy complexity and partial occlusion. These results indicate that UAV-based imagery combined with AI detection provides an approach for estimating Brazil nut yield, reducing manual effort and improving market strategies for extractivist communities. This technology supports sustainable forest management and socioeconomic development in the Amazon.
Carvalho et al. (2026) studied this question.