{"id":772688,"date":"2026-07-14T06:40:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T13:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=772688"},"modified":"2026-07-14T16:03:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T23:03:07","slug":"bwindi-impenetrable-forest-chimpanzee-count","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/bwindi-impenetrable-forest-chimpanzee-count","title":{"rendered":"Maps Went into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. A Chimpanzee Count Came Out."},"author":671,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","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":[138322,482692,491432,205782],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478432,478412],"esri_blog_department":[478222],"class_list":["post-772688","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-census","tag-chimpanzees","tag-community-led-conservation","tag-mobile-apps","esri-blog-category-biodiversity","esri-blog-category-wildlife","esri_blog_department-conservation-and-environment"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"Discover how local field teams braved one of Africa\u2019s most demanding forests to conduct the first-ever chimpanzee census in Bwindi.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"After years of monitoring Bwindi from space, the Jane Goodall Institute in collaboration with the Uganda Wildlife Authority determined that only a systematic on-the-ground survey could answer how many chimpanzees live there.\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Key Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>The chimpanzee census was built using very high-resolution remote sensing data to shape where teams went, and apps that captured daily field inputs to refine the map as they moved through the forest.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>JGI learned that conservation only lasts when the communities living alongside protected lands are its stewards.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>The rangers and community members who conducted the census left certified, promoted, and on record as the first team to count chimpanzees in Bwindi.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A chimpanzee hears you long before you see it. In dense forest, at altitude, in terrain that announces your presence with every step\u2014a snapped branch, a slip on wet vegetation, a sneeze\u2014the animal is gone. In Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwestern Uganda managed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the chimpanzees resist human contact and are rarely observed, but a recent census revealed that 426 chimpanzees are living in symbiosis with mountain gorillas.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ecotourism infrastructure has been built around Bwindi\u2019s gorillas, but little was known about chimpanzees. The census teams found fresh chimpanzee nests alongside gorilla nests, laid on the same night. \u201cIt was very surprising to find chimps laying nests on the ground,\u201d said Michael Jurua, who led the census survey for the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) Uganda.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chimps almost universally nest in the canopy. In no other place have they been seen to live in such close proximity to mountain gorillas. Twenty census takers cut through dense forest, climbed steep hills, and persisted in their observations across 160 kilometers for six weeks.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jurua lost 20 kilograms to the relentless pace of the marked-nest count methodology, which sends census takers along mapped forest lines\u2014transects\u2014revisited within weeks. The census stayed on track because Jurua updated the map daily, checking observations for accuracy and guiding the next day\u2019s work.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[772726,772711,772720]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Turning the Lens on the Forest That Raised Him<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Michael Jurua grew up in Nyabyeya, a village on the edge of Budongo Forest Reserve in northwestern Uganda. He was eight years old when he joined Jane Goodall's Roots &amp; Shoots club at his primary school in 2008\u2014a Jane Goodall Institute program that inspires young people to make a difference for people, animals, and the environment. The club took nature walks into Budongo Forest. \u201cThroughout my academic and professional journey,\u201d Jurua said, \u201cI\u2019ve always explored ways of giving back to the forests that raised me.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At Makerere University in Kampala he studied geomatics, majoring in remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) technology. He realized that these tools offered a way to monitor forests without disturbing them. In his third year, he entered the Digital Earth Africa and Youthmappers Technical Challenge and went back to Budongo to apply cloud computing and machine learning to <a href=\"https:\/\/digitalearthafrica.org\/en_za\/michael-juruas-quest-to-preserve-ugandas-forests\/\">map deforestation hotspots<\/a>. This work earned him the Wildlife Digital Innovations Award from the Ugandan Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife, and Antiquities.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He has since trained more than 200 young professionals to use geospatial technology to monitor wildfires and assess forest loss in the forests he once walked as a child.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Today Jurua serves as conservation science and monitoring manager for JGI Uganda and as Uganda\u2019s National Roots &amp; Shoots Ambassador. Remote sensing gave him the ability to monitor forests from above. But for many questions rigorous fieldwork is still required.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Reading the Forest<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That fieldwork requirement brought Jurua to Bwindi. The Uganda Wildlife Authority's National Chimpanzee Conservation Strategy called for the count. Conducting the census required funding for fieldwork, science and technology support, and data analysis and publication. Within four days of JGI Uganda naming the needs, JGI chapters in the United States, Austria, Germany, France, and Switzerland had raised the funds and lined up technology infrastructure, satellite data, and science partnerships with academic institutions such as the University of Maryland. The network\u2019s ability to move quickly for the Bwindi census, even as it tries to meet many other conservation needs, says something about JGI\u2019s flexibility and focus on innovative science.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before anyone entered Bwindi, JGI Uganda\u2019s research team worked with JGI\u2019s US-based conservation science team, led by Dr. Lilian Pintea, a leader in GIS-based great ape research and community-led conservation. His strategy centers on an ArcGIS-powered Science and Knowledge Hub that connects JGI staff and partners across chapters to shared data. Devin Jacobs, who manages enterprise GIS for the JGI conservation science team, sourced high-resolution satellite imagery from Maxar, now known as Vantor, and Planet through Project Centinela, that underpinned the terrain analysis, and built the ArcGIS Survey123 form to capture every sighting in the field.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cA lot of what our team is trying to do,\u201d Jacobs said, \u201cis make sure that everyone has access to the same authoritative, high-quality datasets.\u201d<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[772715,772718,772716]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Working in ArcGIS Pro, the team used <a href=\"https:\/\/distancesampling.org\/\">Distance software <\/a>to design 39 standardized transects, each two kilometers long, and laid them across the park\u2019s 330 square kilometers. A high-resolution 50-cm digital elevation model revealed the park\u2019s ridges, depressions, and steep slopes. They overlaid rivers and swamps using UWA data, mapped ranger outposts, and identified trails to each transect's starting point.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">JGI had used the marked nest methodology before, but never in Bwindi, where scale and terrain added new challenges. Pulling it off required expertise from across JGI\u2019s global chapter network and partners, from great ape survey specialists to remote sensing scientists in academia to field teams who had never run a census. James Byamukama, executive director of JGI Uganda, has coordinated more than four gorilla censuses across the Greater Virunga Landscape and oversaw this chimpanzee census. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen an amazing level of partnership like there was in this census,\u201d he said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Each adult chimpanzee builds one nest per night. Nests decay at measurable rates through visible stages. By recording the location, condition, and distance of every nest from the transect line, JGI scientists could model population density across the park. The method demands two complete sweeps of every transect, with teams timing the second visit exactly 14 days after the first.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Into the Impenetrable<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rangers from the Uganda Wildlife Authority were central to the effort. They knew the park\u2019s trails, its seasonal rhythms, and the way wildlife moved through the forest. They also carried weapons in case of danger.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Five teams entered the forest at seven each morning. They recorded details along two kilometers of transect, documenting every nest they found: GPS coordinates, perpendicular distance from the transect line measured with a laser rangefinder, and a geotagged photograph. They also noted gorilla nests, elephants, ungulates, and signs of illegal human activity alongside the chimpanzee data. Finally, they returned to camp around six or seven in the evening.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Base camps moved with the census. Teams would return, eat, and then travel in the dark to the next camp. Jurua slept little, checking data each night for errors. Early in the census, two teams walked in the wrong direction, south instead of north. He caught it in the data and sent them back.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bwindi\u2019s slopes are steep, reaching nearly 3,000 meters in elevation. A slippery plant sent one team sliding half a kilometer downhill before the forest stopped them. The team woke to rain and could see that it fell as snow on the Rwenzori mountains a few kilometers away.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Local porters and trail cutters carried equipment and hacked paths through vegetation. They were, as Jurua put it, the first GPS\u2014the ones who knew where the forest would let you through. \u201cThere are moments when you can\u2019t go further,\u201d Jurua said. \u201cYou have to go back to go around. And the physical toll was real\u2014there was a time when my knees gave out.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jurua presented the preliminary results on-screen during the field decommissioning day. Rangers and community members saw their data points on the map, plotted along the transects they had cleared. It showed chimpanzee nests across all four sectors of Bwindi\u2014coverage the team had earned the hard way.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[772722,772723,772717,772721]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Different Conditions in North and South<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Crossing the narrow corridor between Bwindi\u2019s north and south, the teams found a forest under different pressure. The southern block is the larger of the two, and home to the mountain gorillas and the ecotourism they attract. The northern sector is smaller, less visited, and\u2014until the census\u2014less understood. Chimpanzees concentrate here and gorillas are absent. The census teams recorded the highest density of snares, cut poles, and signs of firewood collection.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">These impacts are not from the indigenous Batwa, whose ties to the southern forest run deep. The northern communities are more recent arrivals, farming families pressing against a forest boundary. They were encroaching, Jurua said, not out of indifference but out of need.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cNow that we know that\u2019s where they concentrate,\u201d Jacobs said, \u201cwe can work with communities in the north about their role in protecting chimpanzees.\u201d That means understanding what northern communities need and building conservation around it.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":772710,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jane Goodall learned this approach by watching conservation fail when it ignored the people living alongside it. The census results, Jurua said, confirmed what Goodall argued: Local people must come first. \u201cIf conservation bypasses those communities,\u201d he said, \u201cit will not last for long.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Communities in the south became better stewards of the forest when gorilla tourism transformed the local economy. The census opens the same possibility in the north. Illegal activity, Byamukama believes, could cease in the same way the southern portion demonstrated.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For decades, UWA managed Bwindi as a gorilla habitat. The presence of two great ape populations of comparable size has already prompted UWA to strengthen Bwindi\u2019s UNESCO World Heritage inscription to reflect what the forest actually holds. The discovery of significant populations of chimps and gorillas will drive more ecotourism dollars to support surrounding communities.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Their findings are now Bwindi's baseline\u2014for future discoveries, and for understanding the pressures chimpanzees face.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The inheritance Jane Goodall left Uganda is a philosophy of conservation, but also a generation of scientists and rangers and community members who know nature\u2019s value and protect it.<\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Learn how\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/conservation\/overview\">GIS powers community-led conservation<\/a>. Learn about <a href=\"https:\/\/storymaps.arcgis.com\/collections\/4bb4a82e722f497dbd55d8649018d3b3?item=1\">JGI\u2019s Tacare community-led conservation approach <\/a>grounded in maps.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Ground Truth: The People in the Place<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Every engagement starts with a map laid flat and an invitation to talk. Not about conservation priorities or protected area management\u2014just about the land. A recent very high-resolution satellite image is used because it eliminates borders and named features in favor of local knowledge. What do you see? Where do you get your water? Where do you cultivate your crops? Where do your children go to school?<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is how the Jane Goodall Institute\u2019s Tacare program has worked since its founding in Tanzania in 1994, and it reflects a lesson Goodall learned early on: Conservation that bypasses local communities doesn\u2019t last.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Over three decades, that philosophy has grown into an integrated science strategy\u2014an enterprise GIS practice that now supports programs across Uganda, Tanzania, Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The geospatial infrastructure has been building for more than 25 years\u2014since Dr. Lilian Pintea, now JGI\u2019s vice president of conservation science, first brought satellite imagery and GIS into community planning sessions outside Gombe. Residents' excitement at seeing satellite images of their own communities, and identifying their land uses in them, became the common starting point. \u201cWe learned that to be effective the entire Tacare process must be grounded in maps\u201d Pintea said, \u201cenabling local communities to map their local knowledge and see how their livelihoods and the health of their ecosystems are interconnected, village by village.\u201d What had been an abstract argument about deforestation became a discussion of what they could do to protect future generations to save their water sources, farming sites, or their sacred places.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That capacity has deepened considerably. JGI has added ICEYE, whose synthetic aperture radar satellites can penetrate both cloud cover and dense forest canopy, to its sensing partners.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThe availability of near real-time data has allowed us to go from a reactive conservation model to a proactive one,\u201d said Devin Jacobs, GIS manager for JGI\u2019s conservation science unit. \u201cEnabling people on the ground by sharing alerts that an area is starting to be impacted and going to mitigate it before it spreads\u2014that\u2019s where the real value is.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Academic partners\u2014including Dr. Laura Duncanson and Abigail Cohen Barenblitt at the University of Maryland, which contributed the vegetation and chimpanzee and gorilla habitat suitability analysis for the Bwindi census\u2014extend JGI\u2019s data-driven conservation efforts. Country-level GIS leads, embedded in the communities and landscapes they work to protect, design and customize the centrally managed tools with the teams that will use them, test them in the field, and maintain them with local input.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Bwindi, that meant rangers and community members who had never used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/arcgis-survey123\/overview\">ArcGIS Survey123<\/a> walked away certified in the tool\u2014and some were named candidates for promotion\u2014after conducting the first systematic chimpanzee census in one of Africa\u2019s most demanding environments.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The map is still how local engagement starts. What\u2019s changed is how local people add their knowledge, pursue advanced degrees, and become the scientists making the discoveries. The local map is now the authoritative one.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Bwindi chimpanzee census is a <a href=\"https:\/\/ugandawildlife.org\/news\/census-confirms-426-chimpanzees-in-bwindi-impenetrable-national-park\/\">Uganda Wildlife Authority study<\/a>, conducted in partnership with JGI. The population analysis drew on contributions from researchers across multiple institutions. From the Jane Goodall Institute USA: Marc Fourrier, Lilian Pintea, Devin Jacobs, Everlyne Lelei, and Nicole Shaw. From the Jane Goodall Institute Uganda: Michael Jurua, Peter Apell, Keith Kasamba, and James Byamukama. From the Jane Goodall Institute Switzerland: Daniel H\u00e4nni. From the University of Maryland College Park: Abigail Cohen Barenblitt, Laura Duncanson, and David Minor. From the Uganda Wildlife Authority: Nelson Enyagu, Nelson Guma, John Makombo, and Joseph Arinaitwe. From NASA's Biospheric Sciences Laboratory: Lola Fatoyinbo. From the Institute for Tropical Forest Conservation: Dennis Babaasa. From Makerere University: Anthony Gidudu.<\/p>","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Counting Chimpanzees in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discover how local field teams braved one of Africa\u2019s most demanding forests to conduct the first-ever chimpanzee census in Bwindi.\" \/>\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\/bwindi-impenetrable-forest-chimpanzee-count\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Maps Went into Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. 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