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Wed Oct 16, 3:48 PM ET

By Carleen Hawn

Software may finally help Biruté Galdikas achieve what decades of fieldwork and activism could not: Save the Bornean orangutan from extinction.

It is difficult to imagine the controversial primatologist Biruté Galdikas extolling the virtues of the digital age--but she does. Thirty-one years into her crusade to save the orangutans of Borneo from extinction, she is more at home hundreds of miles from civilization, armed with a notebook, a ballpoint pen and a 35mm camera, squatting in the jungle to listen for the movements of an antisocial ape hiding high in the rain forest canopy.

Galdikas, 56, is tall and heavyset, with an unkempt mane of graying hair and thick, unfashionable glasses. Her work is believed to be the longest continual study of these rare and reclusive primates. Only 20,000 orangs are believed to exist, according to Galdikas, confined to the wilds of Indonesia and Malaysia. Yet among primatologists, the reputation of Galdikas (pronounced GAL-dee-kas) is spotty at best. She says she has published over 50 articles, but most of her research papers depend on data collected in the early 1970s.

That is because she devotes a big part of her time to crusading for the orangutan rather than simply studying it. She "rehabilitates" orangs that have spent years in zoos and returns them to the wild, a practice some detractors say could expose wild apes to human diseases. Galdikas has, at times, financed her work by charging amateurs for the opportunity to observe and record orang behavior on her behalf. Thousands of her notebooks, filled with handwritten observations, sit in a remote storehouse collecting dust.

"There is nothing known about anything she has observed since 1975," says Peter Rodman, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis. "You can't build a serious study of the social order of orangutans based on that. Biruté is not a researcher at this point, she's an activist."

Galdikas snaps back: "I've been too busy trying to save the species to worry about publishing. In ten years the orangutans will all be gone, and then there won't be anything left to study! What should come first?"

The orangutan habitat is being slowly destroyed by logging, plantation farming and forest fires. Galdikas has lobbied the government of Indonesia to help her to replant the damaged forest and establish a reserve for the apes--Orangutan Israel, she calls it. But these things require government land grants and money, lots of it. Securing both will require the support of the primatological community.

So Galdikas is turning to software to prove, once and for all, the scientific merit of her life's work. Thanks to the philanthropy of an ex-NASA (news - web sites) engineer named Ursula Schwuttke, the same data-analytics software used to track the Voyager and Galileo space probes is being used to mine the contents of Galdikas' field notes for patterns in the habits and social order of the orangutans.

Schwuttke, founder and chief executive of High Tower Software of Aliso Viejo, Calif., donated her program, called TowerView, to Galdikas' Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) after reading Reflections of Eden, a memoir of Galdikas' life among the great apes. "It touched my soul," Schwuttke says. Schwuttke's software gift (which includes staff to run it) is worth $300,000, the largest donation OFI has ever received.

Typically, Schwuttke sells TowerView to businesses for use in identifying irregular trends in massive amounts of data. Paramount Pictures uses the software to analyze its computer network security. TowerView uses complex algorithms to convert thousands of data points into colorful graphics that are easy to interpret. An emerging pattern is represented by a blinking spindle or tower, easily distinguishing it from random events.

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