Event: Geo Week 2026
Location: Denver, Colorado
Host: Carla Lauter, Senior Content Manager, Geo Week
Presenter: Dr. Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science, Jane Goodall Institute
Date: February 16, 2026
When most people think about LiDAR, they think about survey-grade accuracy, construction site documentation, or mobile mapping on city streets. Dr. Lilian Pintea thinks about chimpanzee nests in the forest canopy of Tanzania — and what it would mean to finally find them from above. His opening keynote at Geo Week 2026 in Denver was a 35-minute tour through 25 years of geospatial technology applied to one of the most complex and consequential challenges in conservation science. It was also a quiet challenge to everyone in the room: are you using your tools where they matter most?
Jane Goodall Institute — Dr. Lilian Pintea, VP Conservation Science
Where It Started: Two Landsat Images and a Kitchen Table
Pintea’s story begins in the late 1990s at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where a graduate student sat with Jane Goodall comparing two Landsat satellite images — one from 1972, one from 1999. The data confirmed what they feared: more than sixty percent of forest and chimpanzee habitat on village land outside the park had been lost to deforestation. When IKONOS satellite imagery became available in 2000 at one-meter resolution, it changed the texture of that understanding entirely.
What Pintea and his colleagues did next was unusual for remote sensing professionals. They printed the imagery on paper and walked it into the villages. One community member told him: “Thank you for bringing these maps to the village. I can see these villages on the map and I know that the world cares.”
Takari: The Framework That Makes Technology Work
The Jane Goodall Institute’s approach to geospatial technology is governed by a methodology called Takari — a community-led conservation framework in development since 1994. Takari is not primarily about tools. It is about the relationship between data and decision-making authority. The core principle: local communities should own and lead decisions about their own land. Geospatial technology is an input into that process, not a substitute for it.
In practice, Takari means land use plans are developed with villages using a combination of traditional knowledge and spatial data. Forest monitors on the ground collect the field data. Dashboards showing deforestation alerts are designed for district-level government officers, not just GIS specialists.
From GPS Waypoints to ArcGIS in the Cloud
The technological evolution Pintea described tracked closely with the broader arc of the geospatial industry over 25 years. In 2005, communities were collecting GPS waypoints — thirty-six thousand in a single year, stored on paper, nearly unusable for analysis. By 2009, the Institute was deploying Android smartphones and Open Data Kit in African villages. By 2018, the workflow had matured to Survey123 integrated with ArcGIS, cloud-hosted geodatabases, and purpose-built dashboards surfacing actionable information at both village and district government levels.
The payoff was measurable: areas where forest monitors patrol most frequently show the greatest tree canopy recovery, the most stable carbon content, and the lowest fire frequency.
AI Comes to the Field
One of the keynote’s most striking examples was Josephine Rupia, a natural resource officer managing a vast forest reserve in Tanzania’s Katavi region — without a GIS officer or IT support. Despite years of training, producing maps independently remained difficult. The Institute recently connected her with Global Forest Watch’s AI platform, which allows her to ask questions in Swahili and receive maps automatically.
“I was a little worried it was another request for a map,” Pintea said. “Instead it was a thank you that it was actually working.”
The Institute is also applying AI at Gombe itself: thousands of hours of chimpanzee video footage are analyzed to identify individual animals and behaviors. Microsoft AI for Good Lab has deployed edge AI devices at the site that process audio and visual data locally, sending alerts rather than raw data streams.
LiDAR, Bioacoustics, and the Digital Twin of Gombe
Pintea described an ambitious long-term goal: a complete digital twin of Gombe National Park, integrating drone mapping, satellite data, LiDAR, bioacoustic monitoring, AI-powered species identification, and over 60 years of field research going back to Jane Goodall’s arrival in 1960.
One hundred bioacoustic devices deployed across Gombe in two weeks identified a previously unrecorded species for Tanzania — a dwarf bush baby — and eight bird species unknown to the site. LiDAR has not yet come to Gombe, and Pintea extended a direct invitation to the Geo Week community to help bring it, particularly for detecting chimpanzee nests in the forest canopy. He is also exploring whether synthetic aperture radar, being tested in partnership with ICEYE in the eastern DRC, can reveal threats hidden beneath the forest canopy in ways optical sensors cannot.
Satellite Imagery as Accountability
In Uganda’s Bugoma Forest, Planet satellite imagery documented that a sugarcane company was violating the boundaries of its permitted harvest area and later encroaching on officially protected land. High-resolution Maxar imagery at sixty centimeters provided the visual evidence that finally moved decision makers.
“It created an emotional response,” Pintea said. “Seeing trees, pristine dense forest, and then total degradation.”
In Budongo Forest, LiDAR data collected in partnership with Restore is training global tree canopy cover models and documenting the measurable progress of community-led reforestation for donors and government.
The Bigger Picture: What This Keynote Tells Us About Geospatial Technology
The gap between data collection and community empowerment remains the central challenge. Pintea’s 25-year arc is not a story of technological progress — it is a story of closing the distance between what sensors can detect and what communities can act on.
AI’s most meaningful near-term application may be democratizing GIS. The Josephine Rupia example was not about replacing analysts — it was about giving a busy government official the ability to answer her own questions in her own language, without waiting for outside help.
LiDAR’s potential in ecological and environmental applications is still largely untapped. From chimpanzee nest detection to tree canopy height mapping to carbon stock monitoring, the applications Pintea described represent a genuinely different use profile for a technology the geospatial industry often associates with built environment work.
Synthetic aperture radar is emerging as a critical complement to optical sensing. In dense forest environments, what you cannot see from above with a camera may be exactly what matters most.
The most durable geospatial workflows are built on trust, not just technology. The communities around Gombe did not change their land use behavior because they received satellite maps. They changed because they were given genuine ownership of the planning process that those maps supported.
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