ICEYE US reposted this
Dr. Jane Goodall’s birthday, April 3rd, is the height of rainy season at Gombe National Park — the site of her famed wild chimpanzee research. The Jane Goodall Institute team has sustained the longest running chimpanzee study in the world in Gombe, and this work has expanded to include cutting edge mapping technologies, which aid our conservation work. Gombe is an ideal place to test and improve innovative conservation technology applications because of long-term data, local knowledge, and capacity in the field. One challenge of monitoring chimpanzee forest habitats and threats across Africa — especially in rainy season, it’s nearly impossible to see through cloud cover. Another is that some of the illegal human activities driving the threats to chimpanzees are under the forest canopy, hidden from optical satellites. That is why we are so excited to work with incredible technology partners like ICEYE, who allow us to see the forests in Gombe like never before. This satellite image was taken just this week, in rainy season, and ICEYE technology is able to penetrate through dense cloud cover to reveal the canopy below. You can also see human structures, many under the trees, such as Gombe Stream Research Center buildings and the historic banana feeding station in the forest. This knowledge is supporting our ongoing efforts to monitor chimpanzee habitats and threats in more remote and difficult to access areas, such as mapping illegal mining operations under the forest canopy in eastern DRC. We can’t wait to reveal more about what we observe — and how these data and insights convert to conservation actions and impact.