Visit Rwanda and the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) have launched an innovative use of technology to protect and conserve gorillas and promote sustainable and responsible wildlife tourism in the country. 

With GorillaGram, visitors to Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park can use Instagram to help play an active role in gorilla conservation by sharing their own experiences and photos through the platform.

Using Instagram photos, visitors to the park can now become citizen scientists during their visits by adding optional provided tags that help rangers, researchers and monitoring teams keep track of the groups and individuals via aggregation systems that store the photos in smart galleries. 

Michaella Rugwizangoga, Chief Tourism Officer of the RDB says: "This simple approach gives park rangers, veterinarians and conservationists access to a wealth of verified media content from our gorilla families every single day, including recorded behaviour, changes to the group, interactions of interest, and it even alerts our rangers to any injuries or concerns."

The daily content from park visitors will also be available to the public alongside links to support gorilla populations and habitat conservation. 

According to the RDB, GorillaGram makes the gorillas the first wild animals in the world to have an active social media presence – a vital step in their protection.