Since Dr. Dian Fossey began studying the mountain gorillas of Rwanda and adjoining countries in the 1960's, researchers have tracked, with some interruptions, the fortunes of these engaging creatures in a perpetually endangered forest.
Now, a collaboration of several American and Rwandan institutions is taking that program to the edge of high technology, using remote sensing from satellites and aircraft and electronic trackers on the ground to create a vastly expanded, instantly accessible record of the gorillas and their habitat in digital form.
As powerful as the project's influence on conservation is likely to be, it could carry an even greater importance for a Rwandan government that is struggling to recover from years of war and civil strife. Government ministries, several of which are involved in the project, hope to use it as a way to train people in the use of computers and sophisticated communications technology, said Joseph Mutaboba, Rwanda's representative to the United Nations.
The same remote sensing technology that will map the vegetation and terrain of the Virunga conservation area, where the gorillas live, could eventually be used to follow land-use patterns and search for natural resources in the entire country as it rebuilds, Mr. Mutaboba said. ''The government of Rwanda's goal was to see how much that technology can offer us,'' he said. ''And it is a lot.''Continue reading the main story
For now the project, which has already begun assembling data taken from satellites and aircraft, is focusing on the Virunga area. The project is a collaboration between the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, the National University of Rwanda, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Clark Atlanta University, Zoo Atlanta and a number of Rwandan government agencies. Much of the money for the first two years of the project is from a $300,000 grant from the state-financed Georgia Research Alliance.
The project is using satellites and aircraft to carry instruments that analyze the spectrum of light reflected from soil and plants. Different plants and soil types reflect distinct spectrums, allowing scientists to construct point-by-point maps of the forest and its resources, including the stinging nettles, wild celery, thistles and bedstraw that mountain gorillas like to eat most.
''It can show destruction of habitat,'' said Clare Richardson, the Fossey fund's president. ''It can show pathways through wilderness areas. It can show campsites if you have poachers. It can show tilled earth.''
And all of that information can be combined, she said, with the daily or even hourly coordinates of gorilla groups, as radioed from the human trackers the Fossey Fund has long supported, and who have begun carrying Global Positioning System units that communicate with satellites to determine absolute positions.
''You can identify how much gorilla food exists in the park, and then overlay on top of that what are the home ranges,'' said Netzin Gerald Steklis, director of the fund's Scientific Information Resource Center.
From that, she said, researchers hope to determine the region's ''carrying capacity,'' or the greatest number of gorillas it could support, and figure out why gorillas avoid some areas where food seems to be plentiful. ''Right now we're kind of looking at a critical stage in this population,'' Ms. Steklis said. ''They're quickly approaching the carrying capacity of the park.''
In the United States, the Virunga area is best known from the movie ''Gorillas in the Mist,'' which gave a version of Dr. Fossey's life and research. Like Dr. Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees in Eastern Africa, Dr. Fossey's research was the first to sketch out the social and ecological subtleties of mountain gorillas in the wild. Dr. Fossey was murdered under mysterious circumstances in Africa in 1985, but scientists and local trackers have continued her work.
The Virungas, dotted with half a dozen volcanoes, spreads over about 170 square miles in Rwanda, Uganda and Congo (formerly Zaire). The 320 or so gorillas in the Virungas make up a little over half the world's population; the rest inhabit a separate region, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda.
Since Dr. Fossey brought them to worldwide attention, the gorillas in the Virungas have slightly increased in number. But during the regional war, the area was the highway to Congo, Ms. Steklis said, leading to ecological damage, and perhaps gorilla deaths, that have yet to be assessed. (Although hundreds of elephants and lowland gorillas were reportedly killed by poachers during the war, a first look suggests that the mountain gorillas fared relatively well, Ms. Steklis said.)
This gap in knowledge is the prime motivation for the new project, said Nickolas Faust, a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech's Research Institute. ''The project is about trying to integrate technology into conservation,'' Mr. Faust said.
The first tool in that program is the spectral analysis of light reflected upward from various species of plants. Differences in molecular and cellular structure and water content lead to recognizable variations in reflection at different wavelengths, or colors, of the spectrum, all the way from the infrared band through the visible.
''Plants produce a different color pattern that I can identify,'' said Dr. Larry Lass, in the department of plant soils and entomological sciences at the University of Idaho, who is performing some of the analysis with the help of a grant from the National Geographic Society.
In August, researchers found just how strikingly detailed the vegetation maps could be when they flew over about 100 square miles in the Virungas, including parts of all three of the countries that contain it, in a small airplane that carried a so-called hyperspectral instrument provided by Earth Search Sciences Inc. of McCall, Idaho.
The data, which Dr. Lass and others are still analyzing, contain a minutely detailed spectrum from each patch of ground, about 15 feet square. The research team is also using somewhat coarser spectral images, covering a wider area, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Landsat satellites, said Dr. Timothy W. Foresman, national executive manager for the NASA Digital Earth Initiative, which is also supporting the project.
All this information will be combined in various ways with radar images of the Virungas taken by the space shuttle Endeavor several years ago, digitized topographical maps and other data, said Dr. H. Dieter Steklis, chief scientist at the Fossey Fund and a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. (He is married to Ms. Steklis, the resource center's director.)
Computer workstations and laptops to compile data have been delivered to the National University of Rwanda in Butare, said Paul Beaty, a geographer at Georgia Tech.
The use of that equipment should help in monitoring the gorillas and their habitat, and perhaps even raise the profile of conservation efforts that the Rwandan government hopes will start a trickle of tourists back to the country, said Mr. Mutaboba, the diplomat.
But if financing can be found, the eventual aim for the remote sensing technology is larger, said Dr. Romain Murenzi, chairman of physics department at Clark Atlanta University and a senior principal investigator at the Center for Theoretical Studies of Physical Systems there. ''I would like to be able to have the possibility of a survey for the whole country,'' said Dr. Murenzi, a Rwandan who has applied for American citizenship. ''So they can see what they've got.''
Correction: June 13, 2000, Tuesday An article in Science Times on April 11 about efforts to track mountain gorillas in Rwanda and nearby areas referred imprecisely to research by Jane Goodall on chimpanzees and Dian Fossey on mountain gorillas. Though both were pioneering researchers, they were not the first to describe the animals' lives in the wild. Earlier scholars included George Schaller and Robert M. Yerkes. This correction was delayed by efforts to check other points questioned by a reader, but those proved correct.Continue reading the main story