Grantee Spotlight
Salmah Jombela is one of the few people in the world who has successfully habituated a community of wild chimpanzees. Salmah studies chimpanzees in Kibale National Park in Uganda. The community she habituated is called the Buraiga community.
She worked for two years to get the animals to accept human presence without running away. This is a major undertaking that takes tremendous dedication and patience.
Salmah is a 2023 and 2024 Leakey Foundation Baldwin Fellow pursuing her master’s degree at Makerere University in Uganda. In 2021, she joined the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, a long-term study first established in the 1990s. With over 200 individuals at its peak, the Ngogo chimpanzee community is the largest yet described in the wild. The Ngogo chimpanzees were the subjects of Chimp Empire, an award-winning Netflix documentary series.
Q & A with Salmah Jombela
How did you become interested in studying chimpanzees?
I have been interested in wildlife since I was a child. This was partly because of National Geographic, as it was one of my two favorite TV channels. Watching wildlife documentaries made me love wildlife.
When I grew up, I majored in wildlife conservation at the university. My specific interest in primatology was sparked when I got an opportunity to work with the Ngogo Monkey Project as an intern. I spent over three months watching primates all day and collecting behavioral data and samples. This led me to develop my final year dissertation project to work on primates.
Can you tell us about the Buraiga chimpanzees?
After I graduated from the University, I was lucky to join the Ngogo Chimpanzee project where I worked to habituate a community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park for 26 months.
Our project to habituate chimpanzees in the Buraiga community was conducted over two years from 2021 to 2023. This project was carried out under the auspices of the Uganda Wildlife Authority. The aim was to habituate these chimpanzees for tourism. During two years of study, many chimpanzees in the Buraiga community have become habituated to human presence. During the process of habituation, we have identified 70 individuals and documented other aspects of the behavior of the Buraiga chimpanzees.
Tell us about your research
I am currently pursuing my master’s degree at Makerere University, thanks to The Leakey Foundation.
In the first year of my Baldwin Fellowship, I intended to investigate a purported permanent fission between two neighboring chimpanzee communities in Kibale National Park. Chimpanzee community fissions permanent are rare. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the lab work part of the study could not be completed in time. This work will be done at a later date as soon as the lab work is completed.
Now, I am working on a study to investigate the efficacy of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project Snare Patrol Team in Kibale National Park. In this park, chimpanzees are sometimes caught in snares used to trap other animals, primarily duikers. This results in injuries that directly impact the survival of ensnared chimpanzees.
To address this problem, the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project (NCP) supports several teams that carry out patrols to find and remove snares and map other illegal activities across the entire park. The latter includes logging and poaching of larger animals such as elephants and buffalo.
The work is conducted in conjunction with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, which provides rangers who patrol along with NCP employees. These teams have been working since 2011, and a large database now exists, as the locations of snares and other activities have been recorded with SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool) software.
The Baldwin Fellowship will help me complete my thesis on time.
Salmah Jombela
This degree means a lot to me personally, because I will be the first person in my extended family to earn a graduate degree.
How does your work help with chimpanzee conservation?
My thesis project involves working with this database to investigate the effectiveness of the snare removal patrols on the distribution of illegal activities in the park. Information from this study will be important for conservation purposes and will aid the design of effective management plans.
Specifically, I will investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of illegal activities including snare hunting in Kibale for over 13 years. This information will be useful in the identification of illegal activity hotspots hence guiding the allocation of enforcement teams across the park. This will improve the protection of chimpanzees and other wildlife in Kibale National Park.
Additionally, using a long term dataset will be important in giving clear trends on illegal activities across periods. I am also interested in investigating whether the snare removals have been effective in addressing illegal activities in the park.
How is the Baldwin Fellowship making a difference in your life or career?
I was super excited for my second year of Baldwin Support. Being a full-time student, support from The Leakey Foundation means a lot. It has enabled me to study worry-free, as I would have to work to make ends meet.
My master’s program is full-time, running 8 hours a day, 5 days. Being supported by The Leakey Foundation has alleviated the financial burden that comes with being a full-time student. This meant that I could do my assignments well and on time. As a result, my grades have been very good. I have likewise been able to attain multiple skills including scholarly writing, statistics, research ethics, communication skills as well as field survey techniques for wildlife.
My second year will focus on research as I work to complete my Master’s thesis. The Baldwin Fellowship will help me complete my thesis on time.
This degree means a lot to me personally, because I will be the first person in my extended family to earn a graduate degree. This will set a good precedent for more people to seek an education where I come from. I have always loved to teach and this will make it easier for me to attain a PhD, which is a requirement for teaching at Universities in Uganda.
Why is work like yours so important?
The skills I have learned will enable me to continue doing primate research, which will help conserve Uganda’s primate diversity.
Kibale National Park has one of the largest remaining populations of critically endangered chimpanzees. This makes it an important site for studying chimpanzee behavioral ecology which can help us shed light on human evolution.
Despite being protected, Kibale National Park still suffers from illegal activities such as logging and hunting. Through hunting, snares are set which affect a wide range of species including chimpanzees. Snares can negatively affect survival of chimpanzees.
Investigating the spatial and temporal distribution of the snares is important in identification of hotspots of illegal activities. This will aid in the allocation of snare patrol teams and rangers to improve the efficiency of these patrols.
What’s your favorite fun fact about chimpanzees ?
Following chimps every day has made me really good at identifying their faces, silhouettes and even vocals. Being able to easily tell chimps from a far is such a cool thing. Many of my friends think it is insane and not even possible, especially those in other career paths. So, it surprises them that someone can tell the difference between chimps.
I routinely collect fecal samples of the chimpanzees, and the never-ending excitement I get when the chimps poop is surprising to many. I should be over it by now but hey, it’s like a tiny prize at the end of each day!
