Page 11 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

The birth of Tacare 9
reserves and recently established local authority forest reserves that are managed by district governments and local communities.
Over the past 30 years, many of the trees in these areas, growing from seeds and tree roots left in the ground, have reached heights of over 20 feet. Other villages have set aside land for reforestation outside the Gombe National Park that will form contiguous stretches of forest habitat, acting as corridors that enable the previously isolated Gombe chimpan- zees to interact with other remnant groups and prevent inbreeding. Sev- eral females have already made use of these corridors, which are also used by other wildlife, thus greatly benefiting the biodiversity of the area.
With support from the United States Agency for International Devel- opment (USAID) and other donors we now work in 104 villages in the Greater Gombe Ecosystem, and the large contiguous area in the south, the Masito-Ugalla Ecosystem. In this area we have funded many of the government-required village land use plans and trained volunteer forest monitors from the villages to patrol their village forest reserves. They use mobile apps on smartphones to report on the health of their forests, pin- pointing illegal activities (such as tree cutting or animal traps), the success of forest restoration efforts, and sightings or indications of the presence of animals such as chimpanzees, leopards, and pangolins. All this informa- tion is collected in a standardized way and sent immediately to Western Tanzania Decision Support and Alert System, managed by JGI’s ArcGIS Online platform in the cloud. JGI staff, local officials, and other partners can use dashboards to download and view it for analysis or share it with decision makers in the village and district governments. Thus, the infor- mation is totally transparent. The total area covered by our various proj- ects in western Tanzania is now almost 6,732 square miles (17,435 square kilometers).