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Jane Goodall Institute — Gombe Chimpanzee Blog

The 100 million users of Google Earth can now zoom down into the lush canopy of trees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania and read daily updates about the lives of the park's famous chimpanzees. It is a new kind of wildlife media: stories and photos capturing the daily drama of chimpanzee life, appearing five days a week on the web. Fans say the entries are like a soap opera about wild chimpanzees. - Jane Goodall Institute Press Release, July 26, 2006

I've been to Gombe, and this weblog is the next best thing to being there. Gombe is a special place to Jane and the staff of JGI, and we are delighted we can share it 'close-up' with the world at large thanks to Google Earth and our conservation scientists. - Bill Johnston, President, JGI

Mission

The Jane Goodall Institute advances the power of individuals to take informed and compassionate action to improve the environment of all living things. Founded in 1977, it continues Dr. Goodall's pioneering research of chimpanzee behavior – research which transformed scientific perceptions of the relationship between humans and animals. It is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. It also is widely recognized for establishing innovative community-centered conservation and development programs in Africa, and the Roots & Shoots education program, which has groups in more than 95 countries.

Introduction

Jane Goodall
Blog entry by research scientist Emily Wroblewski
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The Jane Goodall Institute launched the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog in 2006 with daily updates from field researcher Emily Wroblewski, who is studying paternity among the chimpanzees. Her entries provide a glimpse of chimpanzee field research and an ongoing view of the research program begun by Jane Goodall in 1960. Emily is trying to determine if paternal relatives treat each other in special ways, favoring each other, for example, through grooming or sharing of meat.

In July 2006, Google aided the project by publishing new 61-centimeter high-resolution satellite images of Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The high-resolution images were provided to Google Earth by DigitalGlobe, Inc., of Longmont, Colo.

The new imagery clearly depicts the extent of deforestation in the Gombe region – lush and green inside the park boundaries and desert-like outside. In fact, despite research and preservation efforts at Gombe, the habitat around the park is disappearing at an alarming rate. What was once a vast, flourishing forest with 120 to 140 chimps is now home to some 90 chimpanzees. The deforestation is a critical problem for Gombe chimps who have seen feeding range outside the park shrink. Those feeding areas are critical for long-term survival of Gombe chimpanzees.

Why Google Earth?

We decided to use Google Earth because it presented us with an unprecedented way to bring our potential donors to the places in the world where we work. Google Earth gave us a canvas on which we can vividly illustrate disappearing habitats and the effects of poverty, including deforestation and unsustainable farming—all with the click of a mouse.

Our projects with Google Earth started out fairly small. We devoted only a handful of people to the initial project. Our webmaster Bryce Tugwell, Emily in Gombe, and an editor here in the US, JGI'S Jacqueline Conciatore, were all we needed to get started. It took us less than a week to get our first blog posts up and running.

Over time, the blog and our uses for Google Earth have grown. The core group that manages the blog has remained fairly small, but the impact of the blog on the way we have been able to communicate our story and our work has grown tremendously.

Our KML Implementation

The heart of our KML files has always been about the story—the work that we do everyday on the ground and the history of the places where we work. The second rendition of the blog added a set of layers that we hope provide context for our stories and work:
  • The boundaries of Gombe National Park
  • The Watershed information
  • A collection of landmarks on which we are still working now to identify geographic features, valley names, and locations of historic importance

Jane Goodall
High-resolution imagery of Gombe National Park and environs;
the deforestation outside the park boundary is readily apparent.
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The most interesting aspect of our KMLs (and where we hope to move in the future) involves work with network links, which we use as blog feeds and to dynamically update information that we provide as context for our posts. We also use balloon styling to help create a branded and visually more compelling layout for our content.

We have also incorporated Google Maps into our blog. Google Maps has transformed the way our users (both readers and bloggers) interact with the blog, which has been a huge leap forward for the blog.

The biggest challenge has been getting the voice of our bloggers "on the ground" into the blog—teaching them to use GPS equipment and publish on the blog regularly. For the two years of the project, we hand-coded every post we made to the blog, which was time consuming and not always easy to get done. Ultimately, we created our blogging software, EarthWatchr, which we built to simplify and streamline the process of generating KML and web content from a single content management tool. Believing that this software would be useful to other conservation organizations and individuals who are working to do similar work in their own local neighborhoods, we plan to make the software available under an open source license in July 2007.

Exposure, Recognition, and Impact

Jane Goodall
Watersheds of Gombe National Park
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For two years we published our KML files to our blog, with a new release of the blog in June, 2007. We publicized on our web site, via RSS, and were selected to be part of the Global Awareness folder in Google Earth's built-in layers.

Using Google Earth on our blog has resulted in:

  • Raised awareness of issues on the part of the public and policy makers
  • Increased media coverage
  • Raised the profile of our organization
  • Increased web site traffic
  • New ideas for projects



Advice To Others

Explore what Google Earth can do for your cause, how it can inform you, your mission, and those you serve. This kind of innovation is such a wonderfully rich and untapped way of displaying and interacting with our world. There are so many innovations in the way conservation organizations work just waiting to be created in this new medium.

Author

Bryce Tugwell, Director of Web Development, Jane Goodall Institute

Contact

Nona Gandelman
Phone: (703) 682-9220
Email: ngandelman@janegoodall.org