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.