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
Dr. Lilian Pintea's opening keynote at Geo Week 2026 presented a 35-minute exploration of geospatial technology applied to conservation science over 25 years. His presentation challenged the audience: "are you using your tools where they matter most?"
Where It Started: Two Landsat Images and a Kitchen Table
In the late 1990s at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, a graduate student compared two Landsat satellite images — one from 1972, one from 1999. The data revealed that more than 60% 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, understanding deepened significantly.
The Institute took an unconventional approach: they printed imagery on paper and brought it to villages. One community member responded: "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 geospatial approach is governed by Takari, a community-led conservation framework in development since 1994. Takari prioritizes the relationship between data and decision-making authority — local communities should own and lead decisions about their own land. Geospatial technology serves as input, not substitution.
In practice, land use plans are developed with villages using traditional knowledge and spatial data. Forest monitors collect field data. Dashboards showing deforestation alerts are designed for district-level government officers and communities, not exclusively for GIS specialists.
From GPS Waypoints to ArcGIS in the Cloud
The technological evolution tracked with the broader geospatial industry over 25 years:
- 2005: Communities collected 36,000 GPS waypoints annually, stored on paper, nearly unusable for analysis
- 2009: Android smartphones and Open Data Kit deployed in African villages
- 2018: Survey123 integrated with ArcGIS, cloud-hosted geodatabases, and purpose-built dashboards for village and district government levels
Results proved measurable: areas with frequent forest monitor patrols showed the greatest tree canopy recovery, most stable carbon content, and lowest fire frequency.
AI Comes to the Field
Josephine Rupia, a natural resource officer managing a vast forest reserve in Tanzania's Katavi region, previously struggled to produce maps independently despite years of training. The Institute connected her with Global Forest Watch's AI platform, allowing 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 also applies AI at Gombe: thousands of hours of chimpanzee video footage are analyzed to identify individual animals and behaviors. Microsoft AI for Good Lab deployed edge AI devices at the site to 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 dating 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 deployment at Gombe remains pending, and Pintea extended a direct invitation to the Geo Week community to help, particularly for detecting chimpanzee nests in the forest canopy. The Institute is also exploring synthetic aperture radar, being tested in partnership with ICEYE in the eastern DRC, to reveal threats beneath the forest canopy that optical sensors cannot detect.
Satellite Imagery as Accountability
In Uganda's Bugoma Forest, Planet satellite imagery documented that a sugarcane company violated its permitted harvest area boundaries and later encroached on officially protected land. High-resolution Maxar imagery at 60 centimeters provided visual evidence that 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 trains global tree canopy cover models and documents 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 central. Pintea's 25-year arc tells a story of closing the distance between what sensors detect and what communities can act upon.
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 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 remains largely untapped. From chimpanzee nest detection to tree canopy height mapping to carbon stock monitoring, these applications represent a genuinely different use profile for a technology often associated with built environment work.
Synthetic aperture radar is emerging as a critical complement to optical sensing. In dense forest environments, what cannot be seen from above with a camera may be exactly what matters most.
The most durable geospatial workflows are built on trust, not just technology. Communities around Gombe did not change land use behavior because they received satellite maps. They changed because they were given genuine ownership of the planning process those maps supported.
