Indigenous Tribe Uses Drones to Catch Land Grabbers in the Rainforest

The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, an indigenous tribe in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, have begun operating drones in a drive to spot illegal loggers and land grabbers – and they immediately found a deforested site that they otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

“The technology today, for territorial monitoring, is very worthwhile,” says Bitate, a 19-year-old local leader. “Without a drone, that deforestation – which was already advanced – would still be unknown to us.”

The 200-hectare deforested area that they discovered was located in their reserve in Rondonia, explains the tribe to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. After going to the site themselves, they a helicopter seeding it with grass for cattle to eat, photographed the scene and immediately reported the findings to the local authorities.

The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau include only about 300 people, according to the Kaninde Association of Ethno-Environmental Protection, a local nonprofit that provided the tribe with two drones. Living in an area of more than 1.8 million hectares, the tribe is able to benefit greatly from the drone monitoring, due to the difficulty to otherwise protect such a vast territory.