The jane goodall institute (JGI) currently leads an ongoing project (NASA ecological forecasting grant NNX14AB96G) to develop a dynamic decision support system (DSS) to monitor existing chimpanzee…

This is a grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) to develop a Dynamic Decision Support System (DSS) to monitor and forecast the health of chimpanzee habitats in Africa. The project, valued at $146,519.00, started on December 5, 2013 and will end on June 30, 2018. The DSS integrates 15 years of Earth observation data from Landsat with a chimpanzee habitat suitability model and a land use change forecasting model, enhanced by crowd-sourced field data. During the project, JGI identified the need to expand the DSS to monitor and forecast the habitats of all great ape species in Africa, including bonobos and eastern and western gorillas. To achieve this, JGI is seeking an augmentation grant to leverage Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise platform to manage, serve, and visualize the large collection of imagery, raster datasets, and remotely sensed data required for the expanded DSS. There is no set-aside designation for this contract.

The jane goodall institute (JGI) currently leads an ongoing project (NASA ecological forecasting grant NNX14AB96G) to develop a dynamic decision support system (DSS) to monitor existing chimpanzee habitat areas geographically and systematically over time. The project 12-ECOF12-0063 ( monitoring and forecasting chimpanzee habitat health in africa to inform conservation actions, strategies and measure success ) started on 12/05/2013 and has an end date of 06/30/2018. The project reached ARL 6: potential demonstrated and will reach ARL 9: sustained use by the end of the project, with JGI as the main user organization. The project has succeeded in integrating 15 years of earth observations (EO) from landsat data with both a chimpanzee habitat suitability model and a model forecasting future land use change, enhanced by crowd-sourced field data collected by local communities and rangers using mobile devices. With support from a microsoft research grant, the project migrated the models from a UMD server to JGI s azure cloud, along with all the software and data required to model chimpanzee habitats. During the project implementation, we also identified several challenges to the operational use of the DSS. One of these challenges was that the DSS only covers chimpanzees we learned that critical stakeholders such as iucn, unep-grasp, or arcus foundation have the need to assess with consistency the status of all great APE species. As part of its strategy development process, JGI recently decided to also expand its mission from conserving chimpanzees to protecting all great apes in africa, including bonobos and eastern and western gorillas. In order to provide consistent information for decision making, we would like to meet these identified needs and expand the original scope of the DSS to develop suitability models and habitat health indicators for each great APE species in africa. Another challenge is that the DSS is a dynamic system that will require continuous updates; these increasing amount of EO data and results will need to be effectively managed, analyzed, and leveraged. JGI would like to partner with esri to use its powerful arcgis platform, including imager server, geoplanner and story maps to manage, serve, process, analyze and dynamically visualize these large collections of imagery, raster datasets, and remotely sensed data. Through image server, JGI will publish and make large collections of multi-format DSS imagery and results available to users to incorporate into the decision-making process around conservation planning. Specifically, we would like to request an augmentation grant to achieve the following objectives: 1. Scale up the dynamic DSS, developed initially for chimpanzees, to monitor and forecast in near-real time all great APE habitats in africa. This will include, in addition to chimpanzees, bonobos and the eastern and western gorillas; 2. Leverage esri s arcgis enterprise platform, data and visualization services to support decision-making in the open standards for the practice of conservation framework.