Brazil: Technology makes monitoring indigenous lands more precise

A territorial monitoring and management system has mapped the agro-extractivist production of the people who live in the Rio Gregório and Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Lands in Acre. Through a cell phone application, the tool also collects demographic data and local biodiversity, and warns about changes in land use.

The Territorial Monitoring and Management System was developed in partnership with the non-governmental organization Conservation International (CI-Brazil) and the Yawanawá and Ashaninka peoples. The tool started to be tested in June 2022 and, so far, more than 274.6 thousand hectares of land have already had their protection increased, benefiting directly and indirectly almost 2.5 thousand people.

The innovation brought by the technology is a differential to alert the indigenous people in cases of fire threats, deforestation, invasion. The tool also serves to register where they are farming or in which region they are hunting, so that they can identify where there is a reduction of a certain species and decide to hunt elsewhere. Some people are carrying out 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 Indigenous Peoples Foundation (Funai), and the ministries of Indigenous Peoples and of the Environment and Climate Change.

Security

In an interview to Agência Brasil, chief Tashka Yawanawá said that the application has made land monitoring easier and safer.

"We used to monitor manually, going up the rivers, the paths of the limitations of the territory, and now, using the drones and the application, it is better because we can save this data. And this data is available when we need to report an invasion. We know exactly where in 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.

Ashaninka Jhon Velasco pointed out that "with this initiative, our female monitors are teaching us how to work with the application and the GPS. This is a very important step that we, the Ashaninka of Marechal Thaumaturgo, are taking."

Tool

Photo: CI-Brasil/Disclosure

According to the vice-president of CI-Brazil, Mauricio Bianco, land monitoring is a great demand from indigenous peoples in Brazil. "Our goal is to bring together two types of knowledge: technical-scientific and traditional knowledge of these peoples," he told Agência Brasil.

To facilitate the users' understanding, the application uses symbols and terms from the indigenous peoples' language. "And they 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 can have much more precise 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 icon design, whether in the shape of animals, fields, or fire invasion, is determined by the indigenous people themselves, according to the users' needs.

"Each people (Yawanawá and Ashaninka) had symbols of the icon according to what they understand. If they don't understand, there is 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 the icons.

Mauricio Bianco pointed out that the data collected is the responsibility of the indigenous peoples themselves. And that it is the people who define who can have access to the application, because there is information that they prefer to keep to themselves.

The president of CI-Brazil also said that the perspective is to expand the access to the tool to other indigenous peoples. Among them, the Kayapós, from the Xingu region, with whom Conservation International has already been working.

Demarcation

The Rio Gregório Indigenous Land was demarcated in 1983 and ratified in 1991, with its limits revised in 2007. With 187,400 hectares, it is located in the municipality of Tarauacá, in Acre.

The Kampa Indigenous Land of the Amônia River was demarcated and ratified in 1992, has 87,205 hectares, and is located in the municipality of Marechal Thaumaturgo, also in Acre, on the border with Peru.