The name Jane Goodall has become synonymous throughout the world with chimpanzees. What has she contributed to our understanding of this species and the wider world chimpanzees inhabit?

This year is full of landmarks for researcher Jane Goodall, one of the world's leading experts on animal behavior. She has just published a book about her life. The prestigious National Geographic Society has named her to its new Explorers-in-Residence program.

And last week, Goodall marked the 40th anniversary of her arrival at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, which is located in east Africa. Goodall's work with the chimpanzee population at Gombe over the past 40 years has changed how we see these close relatives of human beings. The respect she commands around the world has made her one of the leading spokespeople for animals and the environment.

"There's no other person who comes close to embodying the humanity that's required to deal with the environmental issues of this century," says Stewart Hudson, the executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in Silver Spring, Maryland. Hudson places the institute's founder in distinguished company from the last century, including Jacques Cousteau, who revolutionized our understanding of the sea and its inhabitants, and Albert Schweitzer, who pioneered medical practices in Africa.

The person who has become so famous around the world had no such ambitions when in 1960, at age 26, she began observing the chimpanzee population in Tanzania's Gombe Stream Reserve. Those days, and the childhood preceding them, are chronicled in her just published collection of letters, Africa in My Blood.

"It's like watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly," Goodall recently told CNN. "Seeing how the passion of a small child eventually turns into the commitment of a grown up person. And how what used to be wonderful fun became a scientific career."

Goodall's early research at Gombe led to her Ph.D. in Ethology (the study of animal behavior) from Cambridge University in England. But even before she earned her doctorate, she was well on her way to making remarkable discoveries:

• Goodall observed groups of chimpanzees eating meat and organizing elaborate schemes to capture their prey—behaviors that had previously been unknown.

• She documented how chimpanzees created tools to gather food, including a tool from a stick to fish for termites. Until then, humans had been the only known "tool-makers" on Earth.

• She put forth the radical idea that chimpanzees could reason and experience emotions.

Research is continuing at Gombe, helped today by advances in technology. Higher powered cameras have documented new chimpanzee behaviors. Recently, researchers recorded video of a chimp playing with a red colobus monkey—a species that normally would behave as an enemy. Likewise, advances in satellite-aided global positioning systems have made it possible to map the exact location of vegetation that provides food for the chimpanzee population.

Although Jane Goodall made her reputation in one corner of the world, her work and philosophy have steadily expanded around the globe. Her mission has become more urgent as the population of chimpanzees has declined in Africa, from at least 1 million when Goodall arrived four decades ago to 200,000 today.

• By what percentage has the chimpanzee population declined in the past 40 years?

"Jane talks about widening the circle of caring people in the world," says JGI's Stewart Hudson. "We're establishing a global network that connects people, the environment, and animals."

Over the past decade, JGI has helped establish sanctuaries for chimpanzees throughout Africa—in Kenya, the Congo Republic, Tanzania, and Uganda. A primary concern has been the growing number of orphaned chimps, whose parents have died from the decrease in food supply and the increase in hunting.

In 1991, Goodall reached out to students around the world by founding Roots & Shoots, which encourages youngsters to raise their environmental awareness and develop solutions to environmental problems. The number of Roots & Shoots chapters has grown to 1,400 throughout 50 countries, including the United States. In recent projects, students in Japan published a newsletter containing articles on saving elephants and recycling paper. Elementary school students in England rescued ailing chickens from a factory farm and nursed them back to health.

Goodall and JGI have mounted a campaign to deal with the slaughter of chimpanzees and other primates for meat. This practice, once used by the local population to feed themselves, has become a large-scale business. "The worst threat to...all animals in central Africa today is the bushmeat trade, that is, hunting animals commercially for food." Goodall told CNN. "The hunters go along logging roads, they shoot everything, they smoke it, load it on trucks, and sell it in the towns....We estimate that within the next 15 to 20 years, most of the great apes of the Congo basin will be gone if we can't do something to halt the bushmeat trade."

Learn More

• The following Riverdeep activities provide a greater understanding of how animal populations survive in the wild:

More Links

• Visit the Jane Goodall Institute online.

Related Resources

• Get these recent and past books by Jane Goodall:

Africa in My Blood : An Autobiography in Letters

My Life With the Chimpanzees