When I first got to Gombe, it was 1960 At that time, there was forest all the way along the lake
and you could climb up to the top of the rift
escarpment and look down, It was chimp habitat forest everywhere.
I had notebooks and pencils or pens and I had one pair of second hand binoculars.
And I think they hurt my eyes actually cause I was always trying to see just a little bit
more than I actually could
Fortunately, just before the money ran out, I saw one of the chimpanzees, the first to
begin to lose his fear of me and he was actually picking leafy twigs and stripping the leaves
to fish for termites, which was making a tool. So that was the breakthrough.
Some friends of mine really cared about the research and they started the Jane Goodall
Institute. And today there are so many Jane Goodall Institutes
dedicated to chimpanzee conservation, research and education.
We are working in Gombe since 1960s and we have been watching what's happening
to the forests since then But it took Jane to take a small plane to
actually have that aerial perspective
I saw Gombe from space through the high resolution maps from Google Earth and I was looking at
them with Lilian Pintea and it was a shock because it showed so clearly what I had seen
which shocked me back in the early 90s that around Gombe, the first pictures, it was literally
bare hills. And it should have been forest and it once
was forest and it was very clear that the land was becoming increasingly infertile due
to over farming and erosion as the forest cover was cleared.
And thats when it came to me, you know, how can we even try to save these chimpanzees
if people are having such a tough life
So that led to working with the villagers in the early 90s to improve their lives so
that in turn they can come around and be our partners in conservation
Our strategy is that communities are absolutely essential for the survival of chimpanzees
When we go to a village, we first meet the village government
Usually we like to share the status of the work which we do together
And that gives you that extra sense of connection, that feeling that you are actually part of
the same team, you are just working from different perspectives.
We worked with villages around the Gombe national park to make a meaningful and contiguous forest
conservation. So we came up with an idea to have the forest
monitor...
My duties as a forest monitor Are to inspect, patrol and guard the forest
to look out for threats to the forest and animals
and to educate the village on environmental issues
to preserve the forest for the next generation.
The Jane Goodall Institute is putting the technology in the hands of the people at the
local level and they are empowered to make the decisions about what is right for their
own environment.
The forest monitor is equipped with an android smartphone or tablet.
By being able to use simple tools such as Open Data Kit we are trying to empower local
communities in doing the work which in the past only specialists could do
The new technology is very helpful. Before we used paper and pen
to take data. Now, the tablet records accurate location
because it shows all the places I have been.
After the forest monitors collect the field data, they upload it into the Google cloud.
Its not just useful for that village, its actually contributing towards a global effort
of monitoring forests and national resources around the world
The Jane Goodall Institute is not only using Open Data Kit to collect all their field data
but they are also using Google's entire suite of mapping technologies.
So they are really at the cutting edge of using technologies to save chimps and their
habitat.
We are using geospatial technology to bring on the same maps science knowledge and indigenous
knowledge to understand how we are achieving our mission.
We looked over the chimpanzee range and we figured out that by working with nine countries
we can save up to 85% of chimpanzees; and this is our focus.
They've used gombe as their laboratory and now we're together scaling it up.
We want to scale it up across the entire congo basin, which is where so many of the remaining
chimpanzees live. And because we have the Google scale technology we can have thousands
of people submitting data and it can be immediately shared with billions of people around the
world
This all started with Jane Goodall in the 1960s, just a pencil a paper her notebook
and her binoculars observing things that no one had ever seen before.
Now, we can all see what's going on in these landscapes with satellite imagery thats coming
in every day, the data that local communities are collecting on the ground,
and it creates this real time picture of a place that can transform conservation
All the Jane Goodall Institutes working together are really trying to do whatever they can
to conserve forests and if you conserve forested area in order to protect chimpanzees of course
you protect everything else
Every single individual makes a difference every single day and we have a choice as to
what sort of difference we are going to make.