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Geo Week 2026 Keynote – Denver, Colorado

Hosted by Carla Lauter, Senior Content Manager, Geo Week

Geo Week 2026 opened in Denver with a keynote that few in the geospatial industry will forget. Doctor Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute, took the stage to share 25 years of work at the intersection of satellite imagery, GIS, AI, LiDAR, and community-led conservation — and made a compelling case that the most powerful technology is only as good as the trust built with the people using it.

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Jane Goodall Institute – Geospatial Technology for Conservation | Dr. Lilian Pintea, VP Conservation Science

Doctor Pintea opened by taking the audience back to a kitchen table in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where a young graduate student sat with Jane Goodall reviewing early Landsat satellite imagery. Two images — one from 1972, one from 1999 — told a devastating story: more than sixty percent of forest and chimpanzee habitat on village land outside the park had been lost to deforestation. That moment of satellite-enabled clarity became the seed of everything that followed.

Takari: The Framework Behind the Technology — At the center of the Jane Goodall Institute's approach is a methodology called Takari, a community-led conservation framework that uses geospatial technology not to tell communities what to do, but to give them the tools to make their own land use decisions. Takari combines traditional local knowledge with the latest spatial data — satellite imagery, GIS, mobile data collection, and increasingly AI — to facilitate village-level land use planning, forest monitoring, and conservation action. Maps are not delivered to communities; they are built with them.

From Landsat to IKONOS to ArcGIS — Pintea traced the evolution of the tools used over 25 years. Early Landsat imagery gave way to one-meter resolution IKONOS satellite data in 2000, which the Institute famously printed on paper and brought directly into villages — letting community members see their own backyards from space for the first time. By 2005, GIS was central to conservation action planning. By 2009, the Institute was among the first organizations in Africa to deploy Android smartphones and Open Data Kit for field data collection. By 2018, the workflow had matured to Survey123 and ArcGIS Field Maps, with cloud-hosted geodatabases and dashboards supporting decision-making at both village and district government levels.

AI and Real-Time Decision Making — One of the most striking examples Pintea shared was Josephine Rupia, a natural resource officer managing a vast forest reserve in Tanzania's Katavi region. Josephine had received years of GIS training but struggled to produce maps independently amid her other responsibilities. The Jane Goodall Institute recently connected her with Global Forest Watch's AI platform, which allows her to type questions in Swahili and receive maps automatically. "I was worried the WhatsApp message was another request for a map," Pintea said. "Instead, it was a thank you that it was working."

LiDAR, Bioacoustics, and the Digital Twin of Gombe — Pintea described an ambitious vision for Gombe National Park: a full digital twin of the site that integrates drone mapping, satellite data, LiDAR tree height mapping, bioacoustic monitoring, and AI-powered species identification. One hundred bioacoustic devices deployed in just two weeks identified a new species for Tanzania — a bush baby — along with eight previously unrecorded bird species. AI is now being used to analyze thousands of hours of chimpanzee video footage, identifying individual animals and behaviors. Pintea noted that LiDAR collection has not yet come to Gombe and extended an open invitation to the Geo Week community to help bring it.

Satellite Imagery as Accountability Tool — In Uganda's Bugoma Forest, the Institute used Planet satellite imagery to document that a sugarcane company was violating the boundaries of its permitted harvest area — and later encroaching on officially protected land. High-resolution Maxar imagery at sixty centimeters provided the visual evidence that moved decision makers. "It created an emotional response," Pintea said. In a separate project in Budongo Forest, LiDAR data collected in partnership with Restore is being used to train global canopy cover models and document the success of reforestation efforts for donors and government.

The Measure of Success — Pintea closed with a story from Kigali village, where a woman comparing 2005 and 2017 satellite maps of her land described how the forest's return had eliminated landslides, restored a stream, and protected a nearby school from flash floods — even though it now takes her an hour instead of twenty minutes to reach her farm. "I better walk the extra hour," she said, "but I know my children are safe." For Pintea, that exchange captured the true purpose of geospatial technology: not the data itself, but the decisions it enables when communities own the process.

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About Geo Week 2026

Geo Week 2026 took place in Denver, Colorado in February 2026. The conference brings together professionals across surveying, geospatial technology, remote sensing, and spatial data to explore the tools and workflows shaping the industry. Geo Week 2027 will be held in Salt Lake City.

Keynote Presenter:
Jane Goodall Institute – Dr. Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science