Helsinki, Finland – April 22, 2025 – ICEYE, the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space, has entered a partnership with the Jane Goodall Institute USA (JGI) to deploy its Deforestation Solution across conservation corridors in the Congo Basin, with initial operations focused on the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The eastern DRC is often called the "green heart" of Africa. Its vast rainforests, the world's second largest, are a critical habitat for chimpanzees, harboring an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 individuals. The Congo Basin region also has the most diverse ape population in the world. Yet these primates face significant threats from bushmeat hunting, habitat loss due to mining and deforestation, and civil conflict.
The eastern DRC presents a uniquely difficult environment for conservation monitoring. Persistent cloud cover renders optical satellite systems unreliable for weeks or months at a time. Dense tropical canopy conceals illegal activity from conventional overhead observation. Ongoing instability also makes sustained ground-based monitoring dangerous and resource-intensive.
ICEYE's SAR constellation operates day and night in any weather, delivering consistent observation where optical systems are blind. This provides JGI's field teams and conservation partners in the DRC with near real-time situational awareness that directly informs patrol planning, enforcement coordination, and resource allocation.
Together, ICEYE and JGI are strengthening the ability to detect, understand, and respond to threats such as deforestation, illegal mining, settlement expansion, and other forms of forest disturbance. By linking persistent space-based monitoring with on-the-ground knowledge and action, the partnership supports more informed decision-making, better prioritization of limited resources, and stronger coordination of conservation and enforcement efforts. This information will be crucial to the safety of local protected area rangers and community-led guardians, as well as to the protection of primate habitats. It will help JGI and local partners identify human activity that may put wildlife and surrounding ecosystems at risk.
The partnership also expands beyond eastern DRC. ICEYE and JGI have been monitoring Gombe National Park in western Tanzania, the site where Dr. Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking chimpanzee research in 1960. JGI’s Gombe Stream Research Center and the park together are an ideal location to test and improve innovative conservation technology applications because of long-term data, local knowledge, and capacity in the field. Chimpanzees at Gombe face two main challenges to their survival: infectious disease and the deforestation of land outside the park. Deforestation leads to habitat loss and reduces connections between Gombe and other chimpanzee populations, which can cause a loss of genetic diversity. Deforestation also significantly elevates the risk of landslides and flash floods, which threaten human security and leads to the degradation of natural resources supporting people’s livelihoods. SAR-based monitoring at Gombe would provide JGI with continuous visibility into habitat change inside the park and in the areas surrounding it, supporting JGI’s long-term chimpanzee research and its community-led conservation efforts, known as Tacare, to restore and protect village land forest reserves and to help conserve one of the most studied and significant wildlife populations on the planet.
JGI’s field teams and local partners in eastern DRC and western Tanzania will bring an essential on-the-ground perspective to the collaboration, helping to connect satellite-based monitoring to the realities of conservation in the field. This exchange of insight will strengthen the partnership over time, supporting a more informed and adaptive understanding of environmental change across these critical landscapes.
"SAR cuts through the Congo Basin's persistent cloud cover and delivers intelligence to the teams that need it most within days rather than weeks or months," said Andy Read, VP of Government Solutions, ICEYE. "The real differentiator is a step change in persistence. Instead of retrospective mapping, we provide continuous, site-level intelligence—giving conservation teams on the ground the timely insight they need to act."
"For 25 years, JGI has converted satellite data into community-led conservation action," said Dr. Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute. "By integrating ICEYE’s advanced SAR technology, we can now see through the clouds to provide near-real-time insights for vital ecosystems, further enabling our conservation partners with actionable information of unprecedented precision."