How Innovative Mobile and Web-Mapping Technologies Are Empowering Local Communities and Transforming Chimpanzee Conservation in Africa

The 30-year mission focus of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is to protect with partners 85% of chimpanzees and their habitats in Africa. This is an ambitious challenge and can only be achieved through engaging in... [ view full abstract ]

The 30-year mission focus of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is to protect with partners 85% of chimpanzees and their habitats in Africa. This is an ambitious challenge and can only be achieved through engaging in partnerships with a diversity of stakeholders, including local communities. One of the Institute's Applied Science goals is to use citizen science to empower local communities to be better stewards of their environment and custodians of chimpanzees, while enabling them to improve their own well-being. Since 2009, JGI has been developing a simple, practical and easy to use community mobile mapping and monitoring platform. The system uses open source mobile apps such as Open Data Kit (ODK), Android smartphones and tablets and Google cloud technologies to support field data collection and citizen science. Using case studies from Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo this paper presents lessons learned, from community engagement to the actual use of citizen data to support conservation decisions. Recent developments and their potential implications for enhancing the effectiveness and use of citizen science data will be discussed including: development of a mobile app to validate near-real time deforestation alerts from Global Forest Watch; integration of citizen data with remote sensing and ecological forecasting models as part of a Decision Support System developed with the University of Maryland and NASA to monitor chimpanzee habitat health; and the use of simple dashboards and dynamic web-maps for local decision makers and protected area managers to improve access to information derived from community data.