Earth Outreach

For more than 40 years, the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has been working to protect great apes in Africa, whose existence is threatened by habitat destruction, illegal bushmeat hunting, trafficking and disease. The chimpanzee population has dropped from more than two million last century to as few as 340,000 today. JGI’s conservation efforts have been focused around Gombe National Park and western Tanzania, where Jane Goodall first started studying chimpanzees in 1960. The Institute’s work has spread to include Uganda, Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with an aim to scale up to the entire chimpanzee range in coming years.

One of the biggest challenges for the organization has been gathering up-to-date information about chimpanzee populations and threats to the animals in remote forested and woodland areas. For example, despite the fact that more than 60 percent of the area has been deforested outside the park, it can be difficult for conservationists to see if there have been any recent tree cutting activities in the 700 square kilometers Greater Gombe Ecosystem that includes Gombe National Park and adjacent village lands. Another challenge has been finding the best way to share that information with local members of the community, government officials and potential donors so they can understand the severity of the situation and engage with conservation efforts.

The organization began using Google Earth in 2007 to gather and visualize information about the movements of the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park and the state of the forest. The story of JGI’s conservation efforts in the region is featured in a Google Earth Voyager story titled “Goodall, Gombe and Google.”

Over the years, JGI has adopted different technologies to help staff and local residents serving as “forest monitors” to document the status of the animals and the forest and the changes over time. JGI has trained residents of 52 villages in Tanzania to use an open source toolkit called Open Data Kit (ODK) on Android smartphones as part of their mobile data collection system while they are on patrol around the forest. The group is also training members of 15 private forest owner associations and hundreds of rangers in Uganda on how to use the technology. Forest monitors use the devices to log animal sightings, forest clearings, snares and other visual signs of threats that could impact chimpanzees and other biodiversity. The result is one of the longest-running ongoing data collection effort using ODK for conservation.

For many years, JGI has used Google Street View to allow people to take a virtual “walk” through the forest and see the animals and environment up close. With Street View, the organization can illustrate the need for protecting the forests in ways that other technology can’t, according to Dr. Lilian Pintea, vice president of Conservation Science at JGI. “We have satellites looking from above, communities on the ground reporting with mobile tablets, and Street View is in between,” Dr. Pintea says. “It allows people to connect and have an experience walking through the forest. You can travel the same path over time and see the change to the forest, see the number of trees that have been cut down or reforestation progress.”

Dr. Pintea invited a team of Googlers to bring the Street View Trekker backpack to Gombe National Park, so any user of Google Maps could walk in the footsteps of Jane Goodall.

Using a camera from the Street View camera loan program, JGI is able to revisit the sites initially captured and add new imagery . Local villagers are the ones that potentially could use the equipment to put their villages in Street View, which is much lighter weight than the heavy Trekker backpack -- just a 360 camera mounted on a bike helmet.

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Kashindi documents the forest cover condition for chimpanzee monitoring. (Photo credit: Inside Africa, CNN International)

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“The more Street View imagery you have, the more opportunity for visualizing and understanding change and providing a personal perspective,” says Dr. Pintea. “I’m also very excited about Google Earth VR. I can take a decisionmaker for a ‘walk’ in the forest and show them the natural beauty and what’s going to be lost without proper conservation.”

The organization uses other Google mapping tools for other specific purposes: to help communities use the land in more sustainable ways in general, to predict potential chimpanzee distribution and change over time, and to raise awareness about conservation with children. For example, JGI uses Google Earth Engine to map the forests of Tanzania to find biomass that can be used for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Google Earth Engine runs machine learning algorithms in the cloud so JGI can do species modeling and find where are the most important areas for biomass and chimpanzee conservation. For instance, the organization used known chimpanzee locations and variables predicting what makes a suitable habitat, such as elevation and proximity to evergreen forests and steep slopes. The data are input into a model that maps areas most likely to be used by chimpanzees. Meanwhile, Google My Maps is being used by the Roots & Shoots youth and leadership program to help map their communities so they can do more effective conservation around the globe.

“The mobile mapping technology has enabled local communities to contribute and use data to make important land use planning decisions,” says Dr. Pintea. “Today, villagers have the tools to speak up and share information. It’s contributed to social change and democratization. It’s supporting Tanzanians transform the way they manage the forest.”

The Google tools that have been used to capture, visualize and share forest data with local communities has expanded conservation areas as community owned Village Forest Reserves, which is critical given that more than 60 percent of the forest outside the Gombe National Park was destroyed between 1972 and 1999. Funding from USAID and the use of Google and other mapping tools and satellite images have allowed JGI to do land use planning in 52 villages, helping villagers understand the importance of the forest land for controlling flash floods and erosion and chimpanzees and realize that the animals and villages can co-exist with proper land management. The decision makers can easily see in the 3D satellite imagery how the forests have shrunk and how erosion from logging and landslides have destroyed homes and farms.

Reforestation also has improved as a result of the cooperation between villages and conservationists and with the help of mapping technology. Based on preliminary data comparing Landsat and DigitalGlobe satellite imagery from 2005 with 2014, 94 percent of the forest lost between 1972 and 2005 is showed signs of natural regeneration.

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Kigalye Forest Reserve from May 2005 to June 2014, showing natural grassland regeneration.

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