The lady who got there first

 

 

The research at Gombe, Tanzania, started with the arrival of Dr. Jane Goodall in 1960 and it still goes on, which makes Gombe one of the longest continuous animal study sites in the world. In the 1960s, Dr. Goodall used her binoculars to track and observe chimpanzees. Today, research assistants use similar data collection methods and protocols. Every day they follow one chimpanzee and record feeding and grouping behaviour about every fifteen minutes. The data has been continuously collected for more than 35 years, and it is managed at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota. This is a lot of data, and what makes Gombe valuable and unique as a research site. She went to Gombe without any formal training; she went with only her passion and her desire to follow and understand chimpanzees, and we can attribute her groundbreaking discoveries to that. However, she subsequently attended graduate school and received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Her book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986), is still referred to by many scientists and is regarded as an important milestone in the field of chimpanzee behavioural research.

Dr. Goodall is very open-minded and practical to have realised the importance of geospatial information technologies to conservation. In fact, she will be one of the keynote speakers at the February 2009 World Map Forum Conference in Hyderabad organized by the GIS Development and the Ministry of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Government of India.