{"id":554152,"date":"2022-11-21T05:36:13","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T13:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&p=554152"},"modified":"2022-11-23T07:10:41","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T15:10:41","slug":"goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship","title":{"rendered":"Tacare: How a Global Conservation Movement Started with Community-Created Maps"},"author":671,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[97842,482692,25182,323572,477232],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478322,478432],"esri_blog_department":[478222],"class_list":["post-554152","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-agriculture","tag-chimpanzees","tag-esri-press","tag-habitat","tag-tanzania","esri-blog-category-africa","esri-blog-category-biodiversity","esri_blog_department-conservation-and-environment"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"How Tacare, a Jane Goodall Institute program, is helping regenerate the fraught relationship between wildlife and humans.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Tacare, a Jane Goodall Institute program, is helping to regenerate the fraught relationship between wildlife and humans and empowering communities to conserve their precious lands.<\/em><\/h3>\r\nIn the late 1980s, Jane Goodall was flying over Tanzania\u2019s Gombe National Park in a small plane and gazed out the window at the place she\u2019d called home for 30 years. She was shocked by how vulnerable it was.\r\n\r\nAs she recounts in Local Voices, Local Choices<\/a><\/em>, a new book by the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) and Esri, the place where she famously knocked down a series of towering, long-held assumptions about primates and humans looked like an island of trees, completely encircled by human settlements, agricultural footprints, and deforested hillsides. The land around Gombe had become overfarmed and infertile, as local communities had cut down the trees for charcoal to sell or to feed the stoves that cooked food for their families. Without healthy habitat corridors extending outward, Gombe\u2019s island of forest would give its chimps no chance to be reunited with other populations nearby."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554342,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Stress on humans trying to survive was putting more stress on nature too. How could humans protect their chimp neighbors, Goodall realized, \u201cwhile the people living around the borders were struggling to survive, envious of the lush, forested area from which they were excluded? That's when it hit me that unless we could help the people find ways of making a living without destroying their environment, we could not hope to protect chimpanzees, their forests, or anything else.\u201d Any efforts to conserve chimpanzees and their habitats would need to empower nearby communities to develop more sustainably, not just as collaborators, but as leaders\u202fand stewards of\u202ftheir lands.\r\n

A Plan to Put Local People First<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nIn 1994, with help from the European Union, JGI began an outreach program in the villages around Lake Tanganyika. Called the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education program, or Tacare (pronounced tac-ar-eh), it focused on the idea that local people are most connected to their environment.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nNearly 30 years later, the Tacare model has been part of conservation and sustainable development in over 100 communities across Tanzania and inspired similar programs in Burundi, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Senegal, and elsewhere in the world. Tacare, which now simply stands for \u201ctake care,\u201d follows five main principles\u2014engage, listen, understand, act, and empower\u2014and uses maps created with geographic information system (GIS) technology to help facilitate community participation and manage and track change.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nOf course, the risks of biodiversity loss\u2014and the causes\u2014extend far beyond the villages that abut wildlife habitats. The reminders of these risks have been everywhere, as greenhouse gas pollution from one country\u2019s coal industry wreaks havoc on ecosystems across the globe, and as viruses like COVID-19 remind us that human activity around natural habitats can introduce new zoonotic diseases and even society-halting pandemics.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nStill, it\u2019s the people who live closest to wildlife who are most imperiled by broken ecologies.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nFor the indefatigable Goodall and the book\u2019s inspiring cast of characters, this proximity to the problem is also a path to a new approach, in which the future of biodiversity and resiliency is in the hands of locals, aided by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and governments. These communities rely on healthy ecosystems for access to basic services such as clean water, and they are best positioned to protect it. This is the basis of Tacare.\r\n

How a Shared Map Helps Communicate and Connect<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThink of the world\u2019s protected parks and reserves, conjured up from National Geographic and David Attenborough documentaries, and you might imagine a giant, infinite expanse where wildlife can roam free. But grab a map and you\u2019ll see that these places don\u2019t exist in a vacuum: increasingly they're right next to where people live. Conflict often ensues.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nAs Goodall notes, the world\u2019s most ecologically significant spaces exist in between reserves\u2014places like the margins of protected parks, where the human-wildlife interface represents a perpetual tug-of-war over land and resource use. Protected spaces contain only 20 percent of the world\u2019s biodiversity; the rest is found in areas colonized and often overused by people just trying to survive.\u00a0<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554282,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"As part of the initial Tacare program in 1994, Goodall and her colleagues put together a team to go into the communities surrounding Gombe, listen to their needs, and develop a program to help. The team found a litany of threats to nearby chimps and overall sustainability, especially the clear cutting of trees for charcoal production, which led to erosion and worsened the risk of landslides and wildfires. Those kinds of disasters destroy soil and vegetation, hurting wildlife, halting seedling reemergence, and ultimately eroding old traditions and communities\u2019 very ways of life.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nOne of the first critical issues JGI faced was how to designate land title and ownership. In the upper hillsides where the chimps were still traversing, there had never been any demarcation between the villages. A process of physical demarcation, conducted with a committee from the lakeshore village and a committee from the highland village, would determine the boundary, in one of JGI\u2019s earliest spatial or mapping efforts. But geospatial technology wouldn\u2019t enter the picture until 2000, when a PhD student named Lilian Pintea showed up.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nPintea\u2019s love for wildlife had led him from a small town in Moldova to the University of Minnesota, where he studied conservation biology at the Jane Goodall Institute\u2019s Center for Primate Studies, applying GIS and remote sensing to chimpanzee research in Gombe. One of his earliest projects was straightforward: Pintea joined a group of government officials, engineers, and community members at Gombe to, at last, help georeference and mark the boundaries of the park.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nBut this wouldn\u2019t be easy, and drawing up land plans around that boundary would be even less so. Over the years, multiple evictions from protected land and a lack of boundary demarcations had sowed mistrust in the surrounding communities, which made some resistant to preserving trees or doing anything that would add to the forest; some actively hunted chimps outside the park, for fear the chimps\u2019 territory would be appropriated by the government. At first, many locals feared, understandably, that any new planning process, no matter how participatory, would be used to expand the protected forest area, absorbing more of the community\u2019s land.\u00a0<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554352,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Maps as Frameworks for Action<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nPintea is now JGI\u2019s vice president of conservation science, leading its geospatial efforts around the globe; with Adam Bean, JGI\u2019s manager of conservation science, he edited Local Voices, Local Choices<\/em>. But as he and his colleagues and collaborators emphasize in the book, GIS is more than just a tool for conservation science or even sustainable planning. It\u2019s also a powerful communication tool, conveying ideas about the past, present, and future in ways that a presentation or a slideshow often couldn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n

Rather than tell local communities what\u2019s wrong with their environment and offering ways of fixing it, Pintea could now show them. By illustrating the interconnected needs of people, animals, and the environment, a map can help illustrate, for instance, how deforestation has led to landslides. But a meeting might start by simply laying down a map and letting the community talk.<\/p>\r\n\"'This is a place where we do our rituals,' someone might eventually say. \"'This is where my farm is,\u2019 and then they discuss a little bit and say, \u2018This is where we fetch our water,' 'This is our burial site,\u2019 and so on.\u201d Pintea said, adding that points of interest like that \u201cbreathe life and history into a piece of paper. But when incorporating science and technology, you don't tell them, 'This is what you do,' 'This is how you use it,' etc.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nAt the same time, Pintea and his colleagues were learning how to incorporate the technology\u2014and a wealth of new geospatial knowledge\u2014into the planning process.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nAn important lesson arrived one day in 2001. Not long after his arrival in Gombe, when Pintea and Goodall and others learned that a flash flood had ripped through the nearby village of Mtanga, destroying homes and killing people. After a solemn meeting with village leaders, Pintea and his colleagues left worried about the future: unsustainable farming was still eroding the local landscape and destroying trees, which, combined with the growing effects of climate change, only made such disasters deadlier. More extreme weather was coming.\r\n\r\nPintea drew up new maps. First, he mapped the forest cover change inside and outside Gombe around the time Goodall first arrived in 1960, using satellite images from the Landsat program. The images revealed an \u201centire landscape . . . covered by a mosaic of forests, woodlands, and grasslands connected to Gombe,\u201d he recalls."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554362,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Then Pintea downloaded up-to-date, one-meter satellite images over Gombe from IKONOS, the first commercial satellite to gather such high-resolution imagery from space. As he and the villagers studied the amazingly detailed images, featuring every tree, house, and footpath, recalls Pintea, \u201cwe were shocked to confirm that most of those forests and woodlands outside the park were converted to subsistence farms, settlements, or cash crops such as oil palm.\u201d\r\n\r\nTo begin planning for the future with locals, maps became crucial, even simply as a conversation starter. The new satellite imagery helped locals identify features significant to them, which made it easier for them to appreciate the devastation that had already happened and see what could come next for their village.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe image of a lush and green Gombe surrounded by bare, deforested land was important, because it allowed us to then sit down with the local people and have a dialogue about what was happening,\u201d Pintea recounts. \"This gave them a spatial context, and it gave them a collective, transparent, and objective look at how their land uses had been changing their landscape.\u201d\r\n

The People Part of Planning<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe new satellite imagery was cool, but as Pintea worked with the Tacare teams, he was also inspired by the \u201cdirt maps,\u201d drawn with sticks and rocks, that were common during planning meetings. Why not, he thought, incorporate more direct community participation into the GIS data? As JGI\u2019s teams worked more closely with local communities in a handful of villages, large printouts of digital maps, handy for group markup sessions, became frameworks for an eye-popping new understanding of the landscape.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nWith smartphones provided by JGI and using Esri\u2019s ArcGIS Survey123 mobile app, communities monitor the forest themselves, bringing them closer into the GIS process and the day-to-day planning for conservation. On these maps, local and Indigenous knowledge combine with data, science, and technologies to allow users to see and track everything from trees to houses to farms and water sources and even spiritual and sacred sites.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nThis transparent, common understanding of the area provides a way to discuss aspirations and a platform to start to deliberate about the future. \u201cIf you impose plans, you will not get anywhere,\u201d says George Strunden, an agricultural scientist from Germany who started the first Tacare programs at JGI and gets his own chapter in the book. \u201cThe people have to feel that this is something they came up with and they decided to do.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554372,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"It\u2019s also important not to rely too heavily on the satellite data. \u201cThe remote sensing imagery gives you great information on where the vegetation was changing over time, but it doesn't always give you an insight into why it's changing, and it doesn't give you any strategy on how you can influence people to alter the way they do things there,\u201d Strunden says. \u201cThat still lies in the relationships you have and the discussions you have with people and how you engage with them to effect change.\"\r\n\r\nOnce the process has begun, land planning efforts ultimately won\u2019t succeed if the communities themselves don\u2019t see a value in improved land management and if the program doesn't include any ways for them to generate income. That means showing people the value of new agriculture production, like honey, mushrooms, and medicinal plants, and helping communities secure protected access to firewood. It also means incorporating locals, some of them former poachers, into the conservation and mapping process itself.\u00a0<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":554382,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Mobile geospatial technologies can be novel but empowering; training communities to do their own mapping can help enhance community cooperation. It\u2019s a more direct way of showing people that their stewardship of nature can pay off, by literally paying them for it.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nThese participatory efforts pay off for the ecosystem in the long term too. When setbacks happen or things change\u2014perhaps new village leadership comes in and ends a planning process\u2014the close involvement of community members and the long-standing relationships developed through Tacare mean that locals are more likely to keep honoring those land-use plans.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"Because you've taken the time, the local communities really understand why some of these things are happening,\u201d says Alice Macharia, vice president of Africa Programs for JGI, \u201cand they continue to support those processes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThis local and iterative approach isn\u2019t always easy, as a diverse mix of scientists, conservationists, village leaders, and community forest watchers attest in Local Voices, Local Choices<\/a><\/em>, a kind of biography of Tacare. But it\u2019s that eclectic mix of people\u2014often communicating and connecting ideas and plans through maps\u2014that has also helped make Tacare a proven approach to conservation.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nFor Goodall, it\u2019s more than that. Out of the horror of that view over Gombe and over years of other ecological disasters, Tacare, she writes, has evolved into \u201cthe very embodiment of hope for the future of our planet.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nRead the second installment on Wednesday, with details on how disaster spurred conservation. Explore \u00a0more about how GIS helps achieve sustainable conservation with the power of geography<\/a>."}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nHow a Global Conservation Movement Started with a Map<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tacare, a Jane Goodall program, helps regenerate the fraught relationship between wildlife and humans and empowers conservation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tacare: How a Global Conservation Movement Started with Community-Created Maps\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tacare, a Jane Goodall program, helps regenerate the fraught relationship between wildlife and humans and empowers conservation.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Esri\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/esrigis\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-11-23T15:10:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/app\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Chimps-Gombe_826.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@Esri\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\n\t \"@context\": \"https:\/\/schema.org\",\n\t \"@graph\": [\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"WebPage\",\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship\",\n\t \"url\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship\",\n\t \"name\": \"How a Global Conservation Movement Started with a Map\",\n\t \"isPartOf\": {\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/#website\"\n\t },\n\t \"datePublished\": \"2022-11-21T13:36:13+00:00\",\n\t \"dateModified\": \"2022-11-23T15:10:41+00:00\",\n\t \"description\": \"Tacare, a Jane Goodall program, helps regenerate the fraught relationship between wildlife and humans and empowers conservation.\",\n\t \"breadcrumb\": {\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship#breadcrumb\"\n\t },\n\t \"inLanguage\": \"en-US\",\n\t \"potentialAction\": [\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"ReadAction\",\n\t \"target\": [\n\t \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship\"\n\t ]\n\t }\n\t ]\n\t },\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"BreadcrumbList\",\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/goodall-tacare-human-wildlife-relationship#breadcrumb\",\n\t \"itemListElement\": [\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"ListItem\",\n\t \"position\": 1,\n\t \"name\": \"Home\",\n\t \"item\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\"\n\t },\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"ListItem\",\n\t \"position\": 2,\n\t \"name\": \"Tacare: How a Global Conservation Movement Started with Community-Created Maps\"\n\t }\n\t ]\n\t },\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"WebSite\",\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/#website\",\n\t \"url\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/\",\n\t \"name\": \"Esri\",\n\t \"description\": \"Esri Newsroom\",\n\t \"potentialAction\": [\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"SearchAction\",\n\t \"target\": {\n\t \"@type\": \"EntryPoint\",\n\t \"urlTemplate\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?s={search_term_string}\"\n\t },\n\t \"query-input\": {\n\t \"@type\": \"PropertyValueSpecification\",\n\t \"valueRequired\": true,\n\t \"valueName\": \"search_term_string\"\n\t }\n\t }\n\t ],\n\t \"inLanguage\": \"en-US\"\n\t },\n\t {\n\t \"@type\": \"Person\",\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/#\/schema\/person\/8ad23580b2658589de4ea5107d75cb52\",\n\t \"name\": \"Matt Ball\",\n\t \"image\": {\n\t \"@type\": \"ImageObject\",\n\t \"inLanguage\": \"en-US\",\n\t \"@id\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\n\t \"url\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/app\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Author-photo-2024-768x768.jpg\",\n\t \"contentUrl\": \"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/app\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Author-photo-2024-768x768.jpg\",\n\t \"caption\": \"Matt Ball\"\n\t },\n\t \"description\": \"Matt Ball is the editor of the Esri Blog and writes about applications of geospatial technology for all its departments. 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