Chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives,
have had their populations decimated over the last 50 years.
All that time, Earth observing satellites like Landsat have been documenting
the shrinking of their home, Africa's equatorial forest belt.
The Jane Goodall Institute uses satellite
data and images in their Tacare program,
supporting local communities in implementing their own conservation plans,
which have helped restore vital chimpanzee habitat.
Tacare gives me hope.
The way it gives me hope
is it is changing lives.
And it is also empowering the local voices.
There are people they call themselves like forest guardians,
friends of forest.
There are people who are becoming, you know, tree planting groups.
More recently, with support from NASA,
JGI has used dozens of variables from Landsat data like vegetation and
tree cover to create a habitat suitability map for chimpanzees.
Mobile apps also bring in data
in real time to allow communities to actively enforce
the protection of their village forest reserves.
With support from USAID,
community leaders have even used this data in land use planning,
voluntarily moving farms away from areas where forest restoration
would lead to the greatest gain for watersheds,
people, and chimpanzees.
After years of forest loss,
satellite data has helped support habitat recovery.
It works both ways.
Sometimes you show a lush forest
and then you show how a few years later it's devastated.
There's just a few burnt stumps.
But on the other hand, there are other images
which show you a devastated landscape.
And then five years later, trees coming back,
regeneration, new hope, new life.
So the stories that you can tell around the images,
along with the images, make something very, very powerful.
And you need both to make the kind of impact
that we need to make today to help people understand the devastation
we've caused, but to give them hope that we can turn things around.
And that's what these satellite images show so clearly.