2024 SAG Award Winners

AMAZON CONSERVATION TEAM

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Project Goal

ACT has been a pioneer in indigenous mapping since the 1990s and have collaborated with local communities to map more than 80 million acres of South American forests. Participatory mapping with indigenous and local communities helps to record and preserve traditional knowledge, strengthen land rights claims, and support management and monitoring efforts. Throughout the years, ACT has been an innovator in partnership with local communities in the implementation of culturally sensitive mapping technologies, such as handheld GPS units, high-resolution aerial imagery, and smartphones equipped with data collection applications like Esri’s Survey123.

ACT and local partners have enabled the titling of more than 2.3 million acres of indigenous territories in Colombia. The StoryMap Living Territories: Stories of Territorial Justice celebrates these achievements while highlighting the importance of secure land rights for indigenous communities.
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Business Problem Solved

South American ecosystems are under unprecedented external pressures including unchecked colonization, deforestation and burning. These ecosystems—and the indigenous peoples that safeguard them—are essential in the maintenance of global biodiversity and the mitigation of climate change.

Local indigenous perspectives on land management strategies are underrepresented in mapping systems dominated by outsiders and western perspectives. Using GIS in collaboration with local communities helped record and convey indigenous knowledge about key ecosystems to support rights-based conservation strategies.

Technology Implemented

ACT has been using Esri’s ArcGIS suite tools in partnership with indigenous peoples to better protect and manage these crucial ecosystems. Indigenous communities have been using Survey123 to map their sacred sites (key habitats and foci of biodiversity), monitor encroaching threats, and record how these crucial ecosystems are recovering under indigenous management.

ACT has compiled geospatial databases of indigenous land claims in ArcGIS online and built interactive dashboards to facilitate improved access and analysis of land tenure data. ACT has adopted ArcGIS Pro as the foundation of our GIS program—improving cartography and data sharing—while embracing ArcGIS story maps as an integral part of our communications campaigns.

Development Team Biography

For the past 12 years, Brian Hettler has led the mapping team at the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), supporting participatory mapping initiatives, environmental monitoring with remote sensing technologies, and the creation of ACT’s storytelling maps.
Brian supports a diverse, interdisciplinary mapping team of approximately 20 people across South America in the use of maps and field data-collection tools and methodologies that support indigenous rights and community-based conservation efforts. The ACT Mapping team includes:
Linda García - Coordinator, Land Titling Program, ACT Colombia
Germán Mejía - Monitoring & GIS, Isolated Indigenous Protection Program, ACT Colombia
Roché Bhola – GIS Regional Coordinator, ACT Guianas
Pablo Velásquez – GIS Coordinator, ACT Colombia
Marcio Sabbadini – GIS Analyst, ACT Brasil
Libardo Chanchy - Agroecological Engineer & GIS Professional, ACT Colombia
David Delgado – Land Titling Professional, ACT Colombia
Jaime Burgos – Land Titling Professio