It’s another steamy day in Sumatra, one of Indonesia’s largest islands known for its tropical, richly forested landscapes. Throughout the 792,000 hectares (1.9 million acres) of Gunung Leuser National Park roam lone patrollers looking for poaching and other illegal activities that threaten the forest and its endangered wildlife. They’re guided only by a single GPS coordinate, a best estimate of where there’s been damage, and together, they only cover fractions of the park at a time. It’s insufficient, but it’s the best they can do with their limited technology and manpower.
The world needs better solutions to conserve national parks and other areas that are legally protected for their unique environmental and cultural values. After all, what happens in the remote corners of the world’s wilderness has far reaching implications for biodiversity, climate change, freshwater regulation, and other critical ecosystem services on which humanity depends.
Recently, Global Forest Watch (GFW) partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute and RESOLVE to make cutting-edge maps and data about forests available to those who need them most to more easily find and stop deforestation.
Described below is our work with HAkA (Forest, Nature and Environment of Aceh) and FKL (Leuser Conservation Forum), two groups that focus on protecting and restoring the globally important Leuser Ecosystem in Indonesia.
One of the last remaining paradises under threat
The Leuser Ecosystem stretches 2.6 million hectares (6.5 million acres)—three times the size of Yellowstone National Park—across the Sumatra, Indonesia. It’s one of the richest tropical rainforests in the world both in carbon and biodiversity—the last place on Earth where critically endangered elephants, rhinos, tigers and orangutans coexist. It provides food, water and shelter to 4 million people; it’s also under threat. Since 2001, Leuser has lost 9 percent of its forests, mostly to expansion of agriculture and commercial development. Poor governance and conflicting land use plans at the provincial and central government levels exacerbate the problem.
The map shows tree cover loss in the Leuser Ecosystem within Aceh and excludes North Sumatra. To analyze both areas, visit the Global Forest Watch interactive map.
Finding the needle in the haystack
Although the Leuser Ecosystem is protected under national law and contains the Gunung Leuser National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, managing this critical ecosystem is difficult because the area is vast and the human, financial and technological resources available for law enforcement and advocacy efforts are limited. Currently, HAkA and FKL manually analyze satellite data to identify potential deforestation threats, and once their patrol units go offline and into the forest, they have only a GPS device to guide them. They also document their findings using cameras, paper forms and sometimes memory, making it difficult to catalogue and manage information when it’s available.
This low-tech process is time intensive, meaning HAkA and FKL only get new deforestation data about once per month and cover just fractions of the Leuser on each excursion.
Bringing real-time data into the field
GFW is developing big data solutions and tools to help groups like HAkA and FKL cover more ground and be more effective in their efforts. Our GLAD weekly deforestation alerts and VIIRs daily fire alerts are free and updated automatically, providing more frequent updates and drastically reducing the time required for manual analysis.
Patrollers testing Forest Watcher in the Leuser Ecosystem.
We also created Forest Watcher, a soon-to-be-released mobile application that allows users to access GFW data without an Internet connection. Using Forest Watcher, patrollers were able to navigate to alerts and collect data directly through the app, making it easier to view, manage and share once they were back at headquarters and online.
What did we learn?
Pilot testing GFW data and Forest Watcher with HAkA and FKL, we learned there are three main challenges:
