Technology makes monitoring of indigenous lands more accurate

A territorial monitoring and management system has mapped the agroextractive production of the peoples who live in the Indigenous Lands of Rio Gregório and Kampa do Rio Amônia, in Acre. Through a mobile application, the tool also surveys demographic data and local biodiversity, in addition to alerting about changes in land use. The Territorial Monitoring and Management System was developed in partnership with the non-governmental organization Conservation International (CI-Brasil) and the Yawanawá and Ashaninka peoples. The tool began to be tested in June 2022 and, to date, more than 274,600 hectares of land already have expanded protection, directly and indirectly benefiting almost 2,500 people. The innovation brought by technology is a differential to alert indigenous people in cases of threat of fire, deforestation, invasion. The tool also serves to register where they are making an agricultural swidden or in which region they are hunting, in order to be able to identify where there is a reduction of a certain species and decide to hunt elsewhere. Some people are doing demographic surveys in villages. The alerts issued can be sent to authorities such as the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, state and federal police, the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) and ministries for Indigenous Peoples and for the Environment and Climate Change. Security In an interview with Agência Brasil, chief Tashka Yawanawá said that the application made monitoring the land easier and safer. “We did manual monitoring, going up the rivers, the paths of the territory’s limitations, and now, using drones and the app, it’s better because we can save this data. And this data is available when we need to report an invasion. We know exactly where on the GPS these incidents are happening. The use of technology improves the final quality of the work. For us, technology has been very positive for sure. It made our job easier.” Ashaninka Jhon Velasco highlighted that the territorial monitoring of his people was done without the use of technology. “With this initiative, our monitors are teaching us how to work with the app and the GPS. This is a very important step that we, Ashaninka de Marechal Thaumaturgo, are taking. We are trying to improve and learn more and more with this technology that facilitates our monitoring work. And this application is also aimed at our community work, infrastructure mapping and clearing of swiddens.” Photo Tool: CI-Brasil/Disclosure According to the vice-president of CI-Brasil, Mauricio Bianco, land monitoring is a great demand of the indigenous peoples of Brazil. “Our goal is to bring together two types of knowledge: technical-scientific and the traditional knowledge of these peoples,” he told Agência Brasil. According to Bianco, monitoring is done with drones and the data is entered into a database through an application, which makes the work safer. To make it easier for users to understand, the app uses symbols and terms from the language of indigenous peoples. “And you don’t necessarily need to have internet, because the application works online. Then, when they can use the internet, they can download the data. They manage to have much more accurate information, basically in real time, ”he explained. In the construction of the application, icons and symbols were used that represent different issues for each indigenous people. The design of the icon, whether in the shape of animals, clearing, invasion by fire, is determined by the indigenous people themselves, according to the needs of the users. “Each people (Yawanawá and Ashaninka) had icon symbols according to what they understand. If they don’t understand, there’s no point in us doing something standardized”, said Bianco. According to him, these are peoples who have not developed writing, which justifies the importance of icons. Mauricio Bianco stressed that the data collected is the responsibility of the indigenous peoples themselves. “This is important because, eventually, some people collect information that they keep in a database to which the indigenous people, who are responsible and who are mainly interested in having this information, do not have access”, he said. It is indigenous peoples who define access to the application, because there is information they prefer to keep to themselves. The system is complemented with information provided by satellites and agencies such as the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe). According to the president of CI-Brasil, the perspective is to expand access to the tool to other indigenous peoples. Among them are the Kayapó, from the Xingu region, with whom Conservation International has already worked. Demarcation The Rio Gregório Indigenous Land was demarcated in 1983 and homologated in 1991, with limits revised in 2007. With 187,400 hectares, it is located in the municipality of Tarauacá, in Acre. The Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Land was demarcated and homologated in 1992, has 87,205 hectares, and is located in the municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo, also in Acre, on the border with Peru.

Agência Brasil