| | |  | An eleven-year-old mountain gorilla | |
Gorillas to be guarded from orbit
16 April 2002
A joint ESA and UNESCO scheme to keep watch on
endangered gorilla habitats from space is the subject
of a two-day ESRIN workshop this week.
Representatives of UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization), the World Wildlife Fund, the International Gorilla Conservation
Fund and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International and United Nations
Environment Programme
are among those who will attend the meeting in
Frascati near Rome to discuss possible partnership and agreement in joining
efforts.
As Mario Hernandez, UNESCO, describes,
"it was a century ago this year that the mountain
gorilla was first scientifically described, dwelling
in the high rainforests of Rwanda, Uganda and the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Today, due to ongoing
deforestation and illegal poaching, they are a
critically endangered species - there are only about
650 of them left alive. There are also separate
subspecies of lowland gorillas that are also
endangered. However the situation indicates that we are still in time to reverse the process."
| | Virunga volcanoes | |
UNESCO together with the involved countries has recognised the mountain
gorilla
habitat and specifically the area included in the Virunga
National Park in the Congo, bordering Rwanda and
Uganda, and the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in
Uganda to be World Heritage Sites. But these
habitats are increasingly coming under pressure as
regional conflicts cause an influx of refugees. Clearing forest land for agriculture or fuel, and
poaching for food have reduced the living space left for
the gorillas. That is why the WHC has classified the sites in the Congo as World
Heritage sites in danger.
Wildlife workers on the ground are limited in what
they can do. By area these habitats total more than
eight hundred thousand hectares, with long boundaries
across extremely inaccessible and seldom-mapped
terrain. UNESCO and ESA agreed last October to begin a
pilot scheme using satellite data to monitor the changes of land use in the
gorilla habitats and to identify possible environmental indicators.
Radar instruments on board satellites such as ESA's
ERS-2 and Envisat can pierce through the near-total
cloud cover of the rainforest to identify illegal
forest clearance or settlements, data which can be integrated with ground
observations provided by organisations working in the area and
passed to local authorities.
"The case study selected to demonstrate the potential use of Space Observations
is challenging due to lack of maps, weather conditions, high quality
surveys and
reference ground measuments," says Luigi Fusco from the ESA Earth Observation
Application Department. If this pilot scheme is a success, the plan is to
extend it to the monitoring of other UNESCO World
Heritage Sites. There are more than 700 such sites
worldwide."
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