NASA and the Jane Goodall Institute Partner to Conserve Chimpanzee Habitat, Earth Information Center Videos

Narration: Jefferson Beck

Transcript:

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Chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives,

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have had their populations decimated over the last 50 years.

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All that time, Earth observing satellites like Landsat have been documenting

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the shrinking of their home, Africa's equatorial forest belt.

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The Jane Goodall Institute uses satellite

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data and images in their Tacare program,

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supporting local communities in implementing their own conservation plans,

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which have helped restore vital chimpanzee habitat.

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Tacare gives me hope.

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The way it gives me hope

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is it is changing lives.

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And it is also empowering the local voices.

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There are people they call themselves like forest guardians,

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friends of forest.

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There are people who are becoming, you know, tree planting groups.

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More recently, with support from NASA,

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JGI has used dozens of variables from Landsat data like vegetation and

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tree cover to create a habitat suitability map for chimpanzees.

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Mobile apps also bring in data

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in real time to allow communities to actively enforce

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the protection of their village forest reserves.

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With support from USAID,

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community leaders have even used this data in land use planning,

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voluntarily moving farms away from areas where forest restoration

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would lead to the greatest gain for watersheds,

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people, and chimpanzees.

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After years of forest loss,

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satellite data has helped support habitat recovery.

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It works both ways.

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Sometimes you show a lush forest

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and then you show how a few years later it's devastated.

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There's just a few burnt stumps.

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But on the other hand, there are other images

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which show you a devastated landscape.

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And then five years later, trees coming back,

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regeneration, new hope, new life.

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So the stories that you can tell around the images,

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along with the images, make something very, very powerful.

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And you need both to make the kind of impact

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that we need to make today to help people understand the devastation

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we've caused, but to give them hope that we can turn things around.

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And that's what these satellite images show so clearly.