Congo clearings in central Africa

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — "Our small Cessna Caravan plane flew for two hours north of the capital Kinshasa towards the Equateur Province where our Congo Heartland is located," wrote AWF President Patrick Bergin on a recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa. "Below us were seemingly endless dense tropical forests with scattered broad sleepy water-ways winding through the trees on their way to join the mighty Congo River. Occasionally the green canopy would be disturbed by a small clearing of felled trees and smoke where a farmer had decided to strike out on his own and hunt forest animals while growing a bit of maize on the limited fertility of forest soils." Using the latest technology, NASA, University of Maryland and USAID are assisting the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) to monitor these new clearings by overlaying satellite images of the forest canopy and of large fires detected from space on a map of the Congo Heartland.

AWF, NASA, the University of Maryland, and other partner organizations under the framework of USAID's Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) have recently produced the first of eleven poster maps that graphically depict a decade of change in the landscapes of the Congo Basin, a dense forest zone that is home to thousands of wildlife species, including the endangered bonobo. The bonobo, discovered in 1929, is a species of primate similar to the common chimpanzee and which shares 98.4 PERCENT of our own genetic code. Scientists are unsure of the exact number of bonobos left in the wild - they estimate that there are less than 100,000 - but bonobos and their habitat are threatened by the logging industry, the effects of civil conflict, and bushmeat poaching.

The first map produced in the series used Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to map AWF's Congo Heartland, the focus of AWF's conservation work in the dense equatorial forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This map gives onlookers a better spatial understanding of human activates in the area and the impact they are having on the forest and native species such as the bonobo.

The image illustrates what forest areas have been disturbed since the 1990s due to logging, slash and burn for agriculture, and hunting camps. Road networks created for logging allow people to travel further into previously inaccessible parts of the forest and have resulted in the unsustainable hunting of many animal species for food, termed bushmeat.

With the production of these poster maps, conservation organizations and researchers have a clearer picture of the altered Congo Basin landscape and have a new tool to identify key threats to conservation. Conservation groups can also use this information to generate and implement sustainable development plans that will be more effective in improving the lives of people in the area while protecting the surrounding forests and the animals that inhabit them. These posters will make it possible to determine the movement of people, the location of hunting camps, and the effects of logging on the area, which are often times difficult to measure just through observations made on the forest floor.